In his keynote speech at the Conservative party conference today (4 October) Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made claims about Labour’s plan for immigration, rates of vaping among children and the government’s record on police numbers, among other things.
We’ve fact checked three of his claims below. You can watch Mr Sunak’s full speech, or read it here.
“Labour’s plan is to cook up some deal with the EU which could see us accepting around 100,000 of Europe's asylum seekers.”
The Prime Minister claimed that, in contrast to the Conservatives’ plan to “stop the boats”, Labour’s immigration plan is to “cook up” a deal with the EU which he said “could see us accepting around 100,000 of Europe’s asylum seekers”.
We wrote to the Prime Minister about a similar claim he made last month after Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said his party would seek a migrant returns agreement with the EU —we looked into this figure then and found that it is not reliable. It is a Conservative party estimate based on a new agreement established by the EU earlier this year which would see a minimum of 30,000 asylum seekers relocated across EU member states annually, with countries asked to relocate a number of these asylum seekers proportionate to their population and economic size.
The estimate makes a number of assumptions about a hypothetical returns agreement between a Labour government and the EU, including that the UK would be part of an EU quota system even though it is not in the EU, that the UK would be required to relocate migrants rather than contribute financially (as is an option for EU member states), and that the quota system would relocate all asylum applicants arriving in the EU among member states.
We don’t know how many more migrants might come to the UK as a result of any future returns deal negotiated under Labour. The party has not detailed what such a deal would involve or said how many migrants it would be willing to accept, although Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has denied the party plans to join the EU agreement on which the Conservative party’s estimate is based, and the party reiterated following today’s speech that it would not sign the UK up to an EU quota scheme.
“One of the most worrying trends right now is the rise in vaping among children: one in five children have used vapes.”
Announcing a new policy to raise the age of smoking, Mr Sunak said “one in five children have used vapes”.
This is correct for children over the age of 11, but it includes all children who have ever tried vaping, as well as those who currently use electronic cigarettes. Around 4% of children are regular users who vape more than once a week.
According to a survey conducted earlier this year by the health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), in March/April 2023 20.5% of children aged 11-17 in Great Britain had vaped at least once, with 11.6% having tried it once or twice and 7.6% considering themselves current users. Within that, 3.7% of children said they vaped more than once a week, and 3.9% vaped occasionally (less than once a week).
The ASH survey showed discrepancies between age groups. For 11-15 year olds, 15% said they had vaped at least once in their lives and 4.6% were current users of vapes, compared to 34% of 16-17 year olds who had tried vaping and 15% of 16-17 year olds who are current users.
The statistics broadly match figures from the NHS, which conducts a survey of pupils in Year 7 to 11, “mostly aged 11 to 15” every two years. Their latest survey, from 2021, found 22% of children in this age group had used a vape at least once, and 9% were current users, with about 4% using vapes at least once a week.
We now have record numbers of police officers.
Home Office figures show that, as of 31 March 2023 there were 233,832 full-time equivalent (FTE) police workers (including officers, staff, designated officers and Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs)) employed by the 43 territorial forces in England and Wales, an increase of 3.8% on the previous year. (Criminal justice is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland so they are excluded from these figures.)
These figures include 147,430 FTE warranted police officers and is the highest number since comparable records began. The previous peak was in March 2009 when there were 143,769 FTE officers.
However, as we have previously written, the claim that there are record numbers of police is missing important context.
The number of officers has not kept up with population growth since 2010, meaning that despite the increase, there are fewer officers per capita than there were in 2010.
Police numbers also fell after 2010 to 123,189 in March 2019. They increased as part of the government’s 2019 pledge to recruit an additional 20,000 officers by March 2023.
The recent increase in warranted officers has also been offset by a loss in the number of police staff and PCSOs. The latest Home Office figures show there were 244,497 FTE paid police workers in March 2010, a figure that is 10,665 higher than the equivalent for March 2023.
Image courtesy of Chris McAndrew
