New session of Parliament: live blog
Full Fact’s rolling live blog of political fact checks
Did Sir Keir Starmer say he would put taxes up?
We’ve looked at another claim from today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer told The Sun he would put taxes up.
Mr Sunak said: “A few weeks ago he finally admitted it to The Sun. What would he say he would do? I quote, he said ‘we would put up taxes’.”
While it’s true Mr Starmer did say Labour would increase taxes during a video interview with The Sun last month, Mr Sunak’s comment is missing context. In fact, Mr Starmer specified in the interview that Labour would raise taxes in relation to certain “loopholes”, and went on to say his party didn’t want tax increases for working people.
Sir Keir said: “We are going to put up taxes, we’ve already said that, in relation to VAT on private schools, non-dom tax status, some of the loopholes that we’ve identified.” He continued: “We’ve argued that National Insurance shouldn’t go up. We do not want to see increases in tax for working people, we think they’ve been overly burdened already.”
How does National Insurance relate to pensions and NHS spending?
At today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer claimed abolishing National Insurance would require the government to “either cut [the] state pension or the NHS that National Insurance funds”, or “put up income tax”.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves MP also posted on X (formerly Twitter): “The Prime Minister cannot say how he will pay for his £46 billion unfunded promise to scrap National Insurance.
“He can either cut state pensions or the NHS or raise income tax - which one is it?”
The relationship between National Insurance contributions (NICs) and funding for the NHS and state pensions is more complicated than these comments imply, however.
As we wrote last month, revenue from NICs is notionally set aside from other tax revenue for the purposes of NHS and social security spending.
But general tax revenue is also used to pay for these things. So in practice the amount the government raises through National Insurance doesn’t necessarily determine how much is spent on the NHS or the state pension.
We can’t say how any potential future move to abolish National Insurance entirely might be funded. Rishi Sunak did not directly respond to Mr Starmer’s questions on the topic, and the chancellor Jeremy Hunt has separately said abolishing National Insurance is unlikely to happen “any time soon”.
But it’s not necessarily quite as simple as saying reducing National Insurance would mean the government would either have to cut pensions or the NHS, or raise income tax.
Liberal Democrats and BBC Breakfast make waiting list errors
Last week BBC Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty stated that 620,000 more people were waiting for NHS elective care compared to when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took office, but that isn’t quite right. The figure refers to cases, not people, and doesn’t account for some missing data.
Actually, as of January 2024, there were around 300,000 more individual people in England waiting for non-emergency treatment than in October 2022. Read our full fact check here.
The Liberal Democrats also made a similar mistake last week. They claimed that there were “7.5 million people stuck on NHS waiting lists”, but again that figure refers to cases, not people.
When counting individual people, there are an estimated 6.3 million waiting as of February 2024. This is because one person can be waiting for multiple treatments.
We’ve fact checked similar claims before from senior politicians and public figures, including Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney and BBC News journalist Laura Kuenssberg. We’ve also seen Liberal Democrat campaign leaflets confuse cases and people on the NHS waiting list before.
We contacted the Liberal Democrats’ press office and have not received a response, but since getting in touch the Facebook post seems to have been deleted.
‘Pay-per-mile’ claim from London mayoral race: fact checked
Last week a number of Full Fact’s supporters in London received leaflets from Conservative party mayoral candidate Susan Hall AM claiming that Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is “planning to introduce a pay-per-mile scheme” for motorists in the capital.
We believe the format of the leaflet, which appears similar to a parking charge notice, is deceptive campaigning, and raised these concerns on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday. However the claim on the leaflets also needs context.
Mr Khan has repeatedly ruled out bringing in a pay-per-mile scheme while he is mayor, but the Conservatives have argued that commitment can’t be trusted, pointing out that Mr Khan and Transport for London have previously talked about the potential for pay-per-mile charging to be introduced in the future.
While it’s impossible to say whether any politician will end up honouring a specific pledge—we often say we can’t fact check the future—we’ve looked here at the evidence from the two parties.
Prime Minister’s claim about ‘tax cut’ for workers doesn’t account for threshold freezes
In an interview on BBC Radio Newcastle [2:21:30] this morning the Prime Minister claimed that “an average person in work is getting a tax cut of around £900”.
This figure refers specifically to savings from recently announced reductions to employee National Insurance contributions (NICs). On 6 April the main rate of NICs will be lowered from 10% to 8%, having been previously reduced from 12% to 10% in January.
£900 a year is the amount an employee on the average full-time salary (about £35,000) will save in NICs due to the combined four percentage point reduction.
But, as we’ve said before, Mr Sunak’s claim that workers are receiving a “tax cut of £900” misses important context. Ongoing freezes to the threshold at which people begin paying National Insurance contributions and income tax mean the savings for someone on the average salary are substantially smaller.
Once the impact of all tax changes are factored in, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says the average worker only stands to save £340 in 2024/25 while those earning less than £26,000 a year will actually be worse off.
The IFS adds: “By 2027–28, after another three years of real-terms cuts to tax thresholds, the net effect of income tax and NICs changes since 2021 for the average full-time earner will be a tax cut of £140 per year”.
PM’s claim about number of ‘deported’ migrants fact checked
With the House of Commons about to break for the Easter recess, we took a look at a claim from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
Responding to a question from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer on the government’s Rwanda policy, Mr Sunak claimed the government had “deported 24,000 illegal migrants”. This figure appears to be out of date, and needs context.
The Home Office says the Prime Minister’s figure appears to be based on ad-hoc data on the number of enforced and voluntary returns in 2023. More recent official figures show the number was actually 25,646.
But only a minority of these returns meet the official definition of “deportation” and many were people leaving the UK of their own accord, independently of the authorities.
Read the full fact check here.
Telegraph article wrong to claim there’s ‘no National Insurance fund’
Last week we wrote about competing claims from senior Labour and Conservative politicians over what National Insurance contributions (NICs) are used for.
In an article published on 14 March covering some of these claims, the Daily Telegraph stated: “Contrary to popular belief, there is no National Insurance fund that is used to pay for pensions and the health service.”
This isn’t technically correct. While it's true that NICs don't entirely fund the welfare system and the NHS, there is a National Insurance Fund (NIF), the contents of which are formally separate from other tax revenue, and used to pay for social security benefits.
NICs are collected by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. A portion of this revenue is paid directly to the NHS, with the remainder paid into this fund.
That being said, the level of the NIF does not determine the amount spent on social security payments, and can be topped up by general taxation if it doesn’t cover social security payments in a given year. So while there is a separate National Insurance Fund, its existence doesn’t have any meaningful effect on how much money is spent on benefits and the NHS.
We’ve contacted the Telegraph for comment.
Lib Dem leaflets confuse cases and people on the NHS waiting list
Readers have sent us leaflets from the Liberal Democrat candidates for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire, and Bicester and Woodstock, which say that “7.7 million people are on the NHS waiting list”.
As we’ve often said before, this isn’t quite right.
We’re not quite sure when the leaflets were printed, but the latest data on waits for non-emergency care with NHS England—which is what people usually mean by “the NHS waiting list”—shows that about 6.3 million people were waiting at the end of January.
Between them, these people were waiting for about 7.6 million courses of treatment. There have never been more than about 6.5 million individuals on this waiting list, but because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing, the number of cases involving them is always higher.
NHS England did not publish regular data on the number of people on the waiting list until last November. Now these figures are available, however, we think they should be used correctly.
The number of people and cases on the waiting list are both extremely high in the latest data, having fallen below the record levels reached in late 2023.
Prime Minister’s Telegraph comment piece corrected after Full Fact intervention
Full Fact is pleased to have secured a correction to a comment piece by the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
In the article published on 31 January in the Telegraph, Mr Sunak claimed that “18-week waits” in the NHS were “down by 90 per cent.”
However, as we pointed out at the time, 18-week waits for non-emergency NHS treatment in England had actually risen by 4-9% since the government made its pledge to reduce waiting lists.
When the claim was made, we invited the Telegraph to provide a comment for our fact check, before writing to both the Telegraph and Mr Sunak to request a correction. We sent a reminder to Mr Sunak, but he still did not respond. The Telegraph told us to go through their editorial complaints process.
The Telegraph has now amended the comment piece, added a correction note at the bottom, and included the correction in its online Corrections & Clarifications column.
In the correction, the Telegraph says that the mistake in the original comment piece was caused by “a production error”.
We’d like to thank the Telegraph for this correction. However, we are concerned that Mr Sunak did not reply to our request and that it took over a month for his article to be corrected.
Was the chancellor’s claim about ‘falling’ debt correct?
During today’s Budget, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt said “debt is falling in line with our fiscal rules”. However, as we’ve written before about similar claims, and as others have pointed out today, debt is not currently falling—it is forecast to fall.
The government’s fiscal rules state that underlying debt must be falling as a percentage of GDP between the fourth and fifth year of the forecast period.
Underlying public sector net debt, which excludes the Bank of England’s debt and is the measure the government uses in its targets, is currently forecast to peak in 2026-27 and 2027-28 before falling, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
The OBR’s most recent forecast, published today following the Budget, says: “Public sector net debt (excluding the Bank of England) in the central forecast rises from 88.8 per cent of GDP this year to a peak of 93.2 per cent of GDP in 2027-28, before falling slightly to 92.9 per cent of GDP in 2028-29.” (The OBR forecasts that debt will first hit the peak of 93.2% of GDP in 2026-27.)
After the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrongly claimed “debt is falling” last November, the UK Statistics Authority warned this claim “may have undermined trust in the government’s use of statistics and quantitative analysis in this area”.