Politics Live

This morning Prime Minister Rishi Sunak spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in what will be one of many interviews during the six-week campaign. We spotted two claims we’ve looked at before, as well as a claim comparing the UK's GDP growth to other countries. 

Mr Sunak claimed: “The economy is growing faster than almost any other major country, including the United States”. As we’ve explained in our fact check, this is true based on the most recent figures for quarter-on-quarter GDP growth among the G7 in 2024, but other measures, such as annual GDP growth, paint a very different picture. 

Speaking about defence spending, Mr Sunak said Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer “has not matched” the Conservative government’s pledge to increase spending to 2.5% of GDP. But, as we’ve written about before, Labour has committed to increasing spending to this amount, though Mr Starmer hasn’t given a specific timescale for this and said only that he would do so “as soon as resources allow”. The Conservatives have pledged to do this by 2030. 

The Prime Minister also claimed “we’ve halved crime” when questioned on the Conservatives’ record in office over the past 14 years. Both Mr Sunak and policing minister Chris Philp have made similar claims several times before.

The claim is based on specific data from the crime survey for England and Wales (CSEW) which doesn't count fraud or computer misuse offences, so doesn't represent all crime.  

The latest survey data from December 2023 estimated that fraud and computer misuse accounted for just over 4 million of 8.4 million total offences. Compared with December 2022, fraud decreased by 16% and computer misuse increased by 29%.

There’s no comparable CSEW data including fraud and computer misuse offences from 2010, because the way the data was collected changed in 2015. Excluding these crimes, the survey estimated 9.7 million offences had occurred in 2010, compared with 4.1 million in 2023, which roughly equates to the 50% fall the Prime Minister referred to.

The CSEW currently records offences such as theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse and violence with or without injury. Experiences of sexual assaults, stalking and harassment are presented separately.

Update: An earlier version of this blog said over 4.3 million crimes were fraud and computer misuse. We’ve corrected the error.

It’s official—after months of speculation, we now know that the general election will be on 4 July.

The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has just announced the date in a short, and rain-soaked, Downing Street speech—you can watch what he had to say here. Labour has released a video with a message from party leader Sir Keir Starmer, while other politicians including SNP leader John Swinney and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey have also reacted to the news. 

General elections are a big deal at Full Fact, as this round-up of what we did last time around shows. And we’ve been gearing up to fact check the 2024 general election for some time—not least with the launch of this politics blog last autumn. We’ll be updating it much more regularly in the coming days and using it as a hub for much of our election content.

In recent weeks we’ve also published a number of pre-election explainers, covering topics such as the asylum backlog, NHS waiting lists and the size of the armed forces in-depth. We’ll be doing much more of this in the coming weeks.

As the campaign unfolds, we’ll be significantly increasing our politics coverage and fact checking key moments as they occur. We’ll be scrutinising party manifestos as they are published, and if there are TV debates between the party leaders, we’ll be ‘live fact checking’, with a team of fact checkers looking at claims in real time. And we’ll be keeping a close eye on claims made online, including political ads. 

We’d like your help to do this too. If you can afford to, then donating to our General Election Crowdfunder will help us fact check the election at a scale never seen before. And if you’ve spotted a claim you’d like us to look at, please do let us know. 

The next few weeks are going to be busy…

At Prime Minister’s Questions today, Rishi Sunak claimed the government has “reduced not just the number of people living in poverty but the number of children living in poverty”.

As we’ve explained before, including when the Prime Minister made a similar claim earlier this month, whether this is correct depends on which poverty measure you use.

The Department for Work and Pensions publishes figures on two different poverty measures—absolute and relative poverty—expressed before and after housing costs. We’ve written more about how poverty is measured here.

The latest figures show the number of people in absolute poverty after housing costs decreased from 13.1 million in 2009/10 to 12 million in 2022/23, while absolute poverty before housing costs also decreased, from 9.9 million to 9.5 million, over the same period.

However, the number of people in relative poverty increased over this period from 13.5 million to 14.3 million after housing costs, and from 10.4 million to 11.4 million before housing costs.

The number of children in absolute poverty after housing costs meanwhile fell from 3.7 million in 2009/10 to 3.6 million in 2022/23. 

But the equivalent figure before housing costs shows an increase since 2009/10, from 2.5 million to 2.6 million. 

The number of children in relative poverty has increased between 2009/10 and 2022/23, both after housing costs (from 3.9 million to 4.3 million), and before housing costs (from 2.6 million to 3.2 million). 

Looking at year on year change, the number of children in poverty has increased under all measures in 2022/23 compared to the previous year, while the overall number of people in poverty increased under all measures except relative poverty after housing costs.

Labour’s national campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden MP, told Amol Rajan on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme [2:10:30] this morning: “We’ve got nudging eight million people on waiting lists at the moment.”

Later in the interview, Mr Rajan said: “There’s 7.5 million people in total waiting for procedures and appointments.”

Given the numbers they used, and some of the other statistics Mr Rajan quoted, it sounds like they were talking about NHS England’s referral to treatment (RTT) waiting times data, which is very often called “the NHS waiting list”. 

If so, they both made a common mistake, which we have written about many times, by mixing up the number of cases on the list (about 7.5 million in the latest data) with the number of individual people (about 6.3 million). There are always more cases than people, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing, but we did not know how many more until November 2023, when NHS England began to publish an estimate for the number of people.

The RTT data doesn’t quite show the whole picture, however, as there are several other types of waiting list within the NHS. 

In April 2024, the Office for National Statistics published survey data it collected in January and February showing that about 21% of adults in England said they were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”. That suggests that about 9.7 million adults in England were waiting for something on the NHS at the beginning of the year—an estimate that is even higher than the ones quoted by Mr McFadden and Mr Rajan.

At Full Fact we’re getting ready to fact check the general election, and this week saw the launch of our General Election 2024 Crowdfunder.

Whether it’s one party making false claims about another’s policies, AI-generated deep fake videos showing candidates saying things they didn’t, or social media posts feeding users tailored facts on divisive issues, misinformation will influence the way some people vote in this year’s general election, or whether they vote at all. 

The volume of misinformation we are anticipating is unprecedented, but Full Fact has the experience and expertise (built up over four general elections and three referendums) to fact check the election at a scale never seen before. 

As well as fact checking false or misleading claims, we’ll be writing about how elections work, and publishing explainers on topics likely to feature in the parties’ campaigns. 

If you can help fund our biggest ever team of fact checkers, please give to the Crowdfunder today. It’s a great time to do so, as the first £25,000 of donations will be doubled by a matching pot. 

With your support, our work can reach millions of people, ensuring that voters in every constituency can make informed choices on the issues that matter to them.

Speaking to Sky News last week about government plans to expand Britain’s nuclear power industry, energy secretary Claire Coutinho claimed the proposals were “in stark contrast to the last Labour government who built no nuclear whatsoever”. We’ve seen similar claims from a number of Conservative politicians in recent years. 

It’s true that no nuclear plants were built during Labour’s term in office from 1997 to 2010. But Ms Coutinho’s claim would benefit from some additional context, given that nuclear plants typically take a long time to build, and the period from initial proposal through to completion can be longer than any one government’s time in office. The Conservative and Conservative-led governments since 2010 have yet to complete a new nuclear power station, and the two sites they have granted new licences to—Hinkley Point C in Somerset and Sizewell C in Suffolk—were proposed under plans drawn up by the last Labour government. 

The lead time on the construction of nuclear power stations can be significant. For example, Sizewell B, Britain’s newest nuclear power station, was first announced in 1969, began construction in 1988 and was connected to the National Grid in 1995.

Having initially opposed nuclear power on economic grounds, Tony Blair’s Labour government later proposed a raft of new power stations. In a speech at the CBI in 2006, Mr Blair warned that failing to build them would make it more difficult for the UK to meet climate change targets and leave the country dependent on foreign imports of gas, “mostly from the Middle East, and Africa and Russia”.

These proposals were blocked following court action by Greenpeace, but in 2009 the Labour government announced fresh plans for a new generation of power plants. 

The 2010 election saw the Conservatives take power as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who were at that stage opposed to further nuclear development. The Lib Dem leader at the time, Nick Clegg, had previously said it would not be worth building such plants, as they would not provide any power for at least a decade. In negotiating the agreement to enter government with the Conservatives though, a position was reached that allowed Labour’s plans to go ahead. However costs spiralled in the aftermath of the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima power station in Japan. 

In addition, privatisation of electricity companies in the 1990s had resulted in what became known as the ‘dash for gas’, where investors turned away from nuclear and coal power stations and put their money into gas-fired power stations that could generate the same power output—and therefore the same level of profit—for 20% of the capital cost. 

Asked why Labour had failed to build any nuclear power stations during its last term in government, current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said in a 2022 Commons exchange: “The last Labour government gave the go ahead for new nuclear sites in 2009. In the 13 long years since then, not one has been completed.”

Defence spending has become a key political battleground in recent weeks, and it came up again today when the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave a heavily-trailed speech at the Policy Exchange think tank.

In the speech itself, Mr Sunak said: “We’ve proudly taken the generational decision to increase defence spending to a new baseline of 2.5% of GDP by 2030. Yet Labour have refused to match our pledge.”

And in the Q&A that followed the speech, Mr Sunak said: “We’ve made the decision to increase defence spending to 2.5%... Keir Starmer and the Labour party have been crystal clear that they don't believe in that. They will not match that choice.”

So what exactly have the Conservatives and Labour pledged on defence?

Last month the government announced that it would increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030.

At the time, the government—including Mr Sunak—claimed this represents £75 billion in additional defence spending. We’ve explained previously that this figure is misleading.

By comparison, the Labour party has said it is also committed to increasing spending to 2.5% of GDP. But unlike the government, it has not set out a specific timescale to meet this target, and instead says only that it will raise spending to 2.5% of GDP “as soon as resources allow”.

In response to the government’s announcement last month, shadow defence secretary John Healey MP said Labour would support a plan that was “fully costed and fully funded, and set out in the government’s baseline budgets”.

The government’s defence spending pledge has been questioned by a number of think tanks, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Institute for Government and Chatham House saying the government has not adequately explained how it will be funded.

During an interview on Good Morning Britain today, Conservative MP and former immigration minister Robert Jenrick said his “personal record” was “instituting the biggest reduction in net migration of all time”.

He added: “I persuaded the Prime Minister to put in place measures that will reduce the number of people coming into this country by 300,000.”

Mr Jenrick’s comments refer to a series of measures announced in December last year. The government has estimated that had these measures been in place, together with previously announced restrictions on international students bringing dependants, around 300,000 people who came to the UK in the year to September 2023 would not have been able to come.

It’s important to note though that these are government estimates of what the impact of the new measures might be. A 300,000 fall in net migration would likely represent a record reduction, in recent years at least, but clearly the actual impact of the measures may be different, and we don’t yet know that they will result in “the biggest reduction in net migration of all time”.

The measures announced in December include:

• stopping overseas care workers from bringing family dependants and requiring care providers to register with the Care Quality Commission if they are sponsoring migrants
• increasing the skilled workers visa earning threshold from £26,200 to £38,700
• increasing the minimum income requirement threshold in stages for family visas
• reforming the Shortage Occupation List and ending the 20% going rate salary discount for shortage occupations.

The government’s detailed estimates for the impact of each measure can be found here. While the eventual impact of these measures is yet to be seen, last week the government said the number of people applying for skilled worker, health and care and study visas in the first three months of 2024 was down by 24% on the same period last year.

Meanwhile, provisional figures show that estimated net migration did fall during Mr Jenrick’s time as immigration minister, but not by a record amount.

At Prime Minister’s Questions today, Rishi Sunak claimed the government has “overseen a fall in poverty, but particularly child poverty, since 2010”.

As we’ve explained before, there are different ways of measuring poverty. There has been a fall in child poverty according to one measure at least, but other measures show a different picture.

When politicians talk about poverty statistics, they’re often referring to figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions on relative low income and absolute low income:

• Relative low income measures the number of people in households where the income is below 60% of the national median average that year.
• Absolute low income measures the number of people in households where the income is below 60% of the average median level in 2010/11, adjusted for inflation.

The latest data shows the number of children in absolute poverty after housing costs fell from 3.7 million in 2009/10 to 3.6 million in 2022/23. 

But the equivalent figure before housing costs shows an increase since 2009/10, from 2.5 million to 2.6 million. 

The number of children in relative poverty after housing costs has increased since 2009/10, from 3.9 million to 4.3 million.

It’s also increased before housing costs, from 2.6 million to 3.2 million in 2022/23. 

As well as looking at the numerical total of children, there is also data on the proportion of children in low income households.

The proportion of children living in relative poverty has increased from 20% in 2009/10 (before housing costs) to 22% in 2022/23, and from 29% (after housing costs) to 30% over the same period. 

The proportion of children in absolute poverty before housing costs was 19% in 2009/10 and this fell to 18% in 2022/23. After housing costs are taken into account, it’s fallen from 28% to 25%. 

Following reports earlier this week that a failed asylum seeker has been sent from the UK to Rwanda, an article published online by the Daily Express has repeatedly described the removal as a “deportation”.

A similar claim was also made in Parliament on Wednesday by Conservative deputy chair Jonathan Gullis MP, who, referring to Rwanda, said “we have now deported our first illegal migrant”.

This isn’t technically correct, according to the official definition of ‘deportation’ at least. As we explained in a fact check earlier this year, the Home Office describes deportations as “a legally defined subset of returns, which are enforced either following a criminal conviction, or when it is judged that a person’s removal from the UK is beneficial to the public good”.

The case being reported this week involved a different type of return, called a “voluntary” removal (where someone liable to be returned leaves the UK of their own accord, either with or without support from the Home Office).

It’s worth noting though that the term ‘deportation’ has sometimes been used more loosely when talking about returns in general. For example, the Migration Observatory says “in general usage, deportation refers to the removal of a foreign citizen from a country’s territory”, while in March the Prime Minister appeared to use the term without being clear that the figure he was referring to covered both enforced and voluntary returns.

It was reported by The Times and the BBC in March that the government had begun offering some failed asylum seekers £3,000 to voluntarily leave the UK for Rwanda.

This is separate to the Rwanda removals scheme announced by the government in 2022, which would involve asylum seekers whose claims are deemed inadmissible in the UK being sent to Rwanda, where their claims would be processed. The Home Office has this week announced that it has begun detaining asylum seekers who have been identified for relocation under this scheme, after the government’s Safety of Rwanda Bill passed into law last week.

We contacted the Daily Express and Mr Gullis for comment but did not receive a response.