Politics Live

In the last few days we’ve seen a number of Conservative politicians, including Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, claim that their government left “the fastest growing economy in the G7”.

We’ve asked the Conservative party to confirm exactly what this is based on, and haven’t had a response. But a similar claim we looked at last year appeared to be based on combined GDP growth figures for the first two quarters of 2024.

Those figures did initially show that the UK had the highest GDP growth in the G7 over that period. But following revisions to the data, it now suggests by that measure that the UK had the joint-fastest growing economy in the first two quarters of 2024, alongside the United States.

The revised Organisation for Economic and Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures show that the UK economy grew by 0.7% in Q1 2024 and by 0.4% in Q2 2024, while the US economy grew by 0.4% in Q1 2024 and by 0.7% in Q2 2024. (In fact, it’s worth noting that unrounded figures show the United States had the slightly higher growth of the two over the two quarters).

Of course, there are different ways of measuring how fast economies are growing or forecast to grow, and we don’t know for sure what figures the Conservative claim is based on. We’ll update this blog if we hear back from the Conservative party. 

Meanwhile in Q3 2024, which broadly aligns with Labour’s first three months in office, the UK saw 0.0% growth. That is the joint-lowest rate in the G7 alongside Italy (though this figure too may be subject to revision in future, and the unrounded figures put Italy slightly behind the UK).

In its election manifesto Labour promised to “secure the highest sustained growth in the G7”. We’re monitoring progress against this pledge in our Government Tracker.

The health and social care spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats has corrected a claim about NHS waiting lists following a request from Full Fact.

Full Fact’s AI tools detected Helen Morgan MP’s claim in the House of Commons on 18 December, when she inaccurately said that “more than 7 million people are on waiting lists” across England. After we contacted Ms Morgan, she submitted a written correction, which Hansard published yesterday.  

This is the first time an MP has responded to a Full Fact correction request by using the improved House of Commons correction system that we called for. Last year, following a campaign by thousands of Full Fact supporters, all MPs gained equal power to correct the record.

When Ms Morgan spoke in the Commons, the latest available referral to treatment data provided by NHS England indicated that the number of people waiting was 6.34 million. Several politicians and journalists have confused this data with figures for cases, which are higher because some patients await treatment for more than one thing, as our up-to-date explainer on NHS waiting lists shows.

We’re very grateful to Ms Morgan for making the correction.

Update: We’re also grateful to Kevin Bonavia MP, who issued a clarification to his claims on Facebook and X about NHS waiting lists after we contacted him.

The NHS does send texts to patients to remind them of appointments, among other things, contrary to a suggestion from the health secretary at the weekend.

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (34:00) on 5 January, Wes Streeting said: “You book a table in a restaurant these days—or even an appointment at the hairdresser—you’ll get a text message 24 or 48 hours in advance to remind you. Why doesn’t the NHS do this?”

But many NHS services already do send patients reminders via text.

While it is not clear how many NHS trusts across England (where the UK government has responsibility for the NHS) offer this service, many patients can opt-in to receive text reminders.

A Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spokesperson told Full Fact: “Many NHS providers are not currently sending digital or text reminders or notifications consistently across all of their services. Based on the handful that have trialled this, if all trusts sent patients reminders, giving them the chance to rearrange or cancel if they can’t make it, it could save a million missed appointments a year. This is exactly the kind of service the NHS should be providing for patients, to make the health service more convenient and cut out waste, and now it will.”

NHS England also told us: “While the NHS App [which was also mentioned on the programme] is not mandated and the offer of digital reminders is not universal, the health service is encouraging all providers to use the technology so that the three quarters of all adults in England who have access to the app can receive the latest information about their health.”

Update: we’ve included responses from both the DHSC and NHS England.

It’s been a busy year for Full Fact’s politics team. 

In 2024 we’ve covered a whole series of major political events, including, of course, July’s general election, as well as two Budgets, the autumn party conferences and a Conservative leadership election. 

Oh, and there was an election on the other side of the Atlantic too. 

In November we were excited to launch our Government Tracker, to monitor progress on the government’s delivery against its promises. We’ll be keeping this up to date in the coming weeks and months—today we’ve just updated the page covering Labour’s pledge on more NHS appointments to reflect the latest data—and we’ll be adding new pledges too. All alongside our regular work to call out false or misleading claims by, or about, politicians. 

We’re now taking a break over Christmas, but there’ll be lots to pick up when we return in 2025. In the meantime we wish our readers a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Sir Keir Starmer has been facing calls to correct the record after a claim he made at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions about two former PMs having “convictions”.

In the exchange on 4 December, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch asked about the departure of Louise Haigh from the role of transport secretary, after it emerged Ms Haigh had pleaded guilty to a fraud offence prior to becoming an MP. Mr Starmer replied to Ms Badenoch saying: “I gently remind her that two of her predecessors had convictions for breaking the Covid rules.”

Mr Starmer was referring to the Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in April 2022 for breaking lockdown rules during the Covid pandemic. 

His comments have been widely criticised, with Ms Badenoch and Mr Johnson suggesting that he misled the House.

It is true, as was widely reported in the wake of Mr Starmer’s comments last week, that FPNs are not classed as criminal convictions. They do not result in a criminal record so long as they are paid within a set time limit. 

Mr Starmer did not actually refer to “criminal convictions” though, just “convictions”, so we’ve taken some time to look further into how that term is used. (It’s worth noting Mr Starmer has reportedly used the same wording previously.)

The evidence we’ve seen generally appears to suggest Mr Starmer’s use of the word “conviction” was misleading, though we’ve not been able to find a universally agreed definition of the term. We’ve asked Number 10 about his comments but not had any response, so we’ve today written to Mr Starmer about his claim.

FPNs were first introduced under the Road Traffic and Roads Improvement Act 1960. Announcing them in the Commons, transport minister Ernest Marples said: “If the person pays the penalty there will be no conviction and no sentence.”

This was echoed in the wording of the Covid rules—for example, 

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 3) Regulations 2020 stated: “A fixed penalty notice is a notice offering the person to whom it is issued the opportunity of discharging any liability to conviction for the offence by payment of a fixed penalty to an authority specified in the notice.”

A 2010 finding by the Court of Appeal Criminal Division [R v Hamer [2010] EWCA Crim 2053] held that an FPN under the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 should not be regarded as a conviction. The case was quoted in Parliament in defence of Mr Johnson in the aftermath of his Covid fine. 

When we asked the Ministry of Justice, it told us there is no universally agreed definition of a conviction, but that FPNs are ‘out of court disposals’. Official statistics published by the Ministry of Justice do not appear to include Fixed Penalty Notices in their count of the number of convictions.

A Home Office guide to police powers defines a “conviction” as “when a person is found guilty of an offence in a court”, which does not apply to FPNs. And when we asked the Metropolitan Police, the force which issued the Covid fines to Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak, it told us: “A[n] FPN is not a conviction.” 

Professor David Ormerod KC, Chair in Criminal Law at UCL, told us he was “confident that FPNs are not treated as convictions”, but added: “In common discourse I suspect people do regard FPN and PNDs [Penalty Notices for Disorder] as convictions of a sort.”

Stuart Nolan, chair of the Law Society’s Criminal Law Committee, told us his “personal view” was that “an FPN is a de-facto conviction”. Mr Nolan said this was because they were “a sanction imposed for an offence which they did not contest, exercised in a criminal jurisdiction”, though he also acknowledged that it was “debatable whether [the FPNs] would be considered ‘convictions’ by most people”.

The letter we’ve written to Mr Starmer asks him to justify his use of the term “conviction”, or to correct the record. We will publish an update on this blog when we hear back.

An article about NHS England targets in the Times on Monday reported that hospital waiting lists “mean 7.6 million people are in line for treatment”.

As we’ve said many times before, this is not quite right. The 7.6 million figure refers to the number of cases on the waiting list, not the number of people.

In fact in the latest referral-to-treatment (RTT) data, which covers the end of September 2024, there were about 6.3 million people on the waiting list.

As NHS England explains in a note on its interactive report: “Each ‘case’ is an RTT pathway which relates to an individual referral for a patient. A patient can be on more than one RTT pathway at the same time if they are waiting for consultant-led elective treatment for different conditions or unrelated clinical reasons. Some patients will therefore be included in the figures above more than once.”

Our AI tools have spotted versions of this mistake more than 50 times in the past year.

NHS England’s RTT data doesn’t cover everyone waiting for any kind of NHS service, but it’s what people usually mean by “the waiting list”. Survey data collected by the Office for National Statistics last winter found that about 25% of adults in Great Britain were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”. 

We approached the Times for comment.

On BBC Question Time last night, skills minister Jacqui Smith, Baroness Smith of Malvern, appeared to repeat a claim we’ve already heard from the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, that Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said she wouldn’t reverse the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions. 

However, as we’ve already pointed out, there’s no evidence that Ms Badenoch said this. 

Baroness Smith said to shadow housing secretary Kevin Hollinrake: “Your leader said she wasn’t going to reverse the National Insurance changes”. (While this isn’t perfectly audible, we believe this is what she said and have asked her for confirmation).  

Mr Hollinrake immediately replied: “That’s not what she said at all, Jacqui”.

Last month, when asked if she would reverse the policy, Ms Badenoch didn’t say if she would or wouldn’t do that. She said if something had been introduced in the Autumn Budget that “will obviously not work and will not raise any money, we will change that”. 

Later, she said “one of the first things that we’re going to be doing when we start our policy platform” is “look again” at employers’ National Insurance. 

We’ve written to Baroness Smith asking for her evidence for this claim, and will update this post if we receive a response.

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The Treasury and Department for Work and Pensions minister Emma Reynolds said on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? on Friday: “The situation that we inherited which is seven and a half million people waiting on waiting lists for operations.” [27:30]

This mixes up the number of people on the NHS England waiting list with the number of cases—a common mistake we’ve seen many times before, and which our AI tools have spotted at least 50 times in the past year.

In fact, in July 2024, the month of the general election, there were about 6.4 million people on the waiting list, according to non-emergency referral-to-treatment (RTT) data, in a total of about 7.6 million cases. Some people are waiting for treatment for more than one thing, so there are always more cases than people. 

Cases on the waiting list are also not necessarily waits “for operations”, as Ms Reynolds said. Although some people will be admitted for surgery, others may receive medicine, equipment or advice to help with their condition, or a decision might be taken to monitor their progress, or not to treat them at all.

NHS England’s RTT data doesn’t cover everyone waiting for any kind of NHS service, but it’s what people usually mean by “the waiting list”. Survey data collected by the Office for National Statistics last winter found that about 25% of adults in Great Britain were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”. 

We approached Ms Reynolds for comment.