What was claimed
Starting 1 December 2025 everyone in the UK will be expected to stay indoors after 11pm unless they hold verified permission to travel.
Our verdict
False. No such policy exists.
An 11pm curfew is not being introduced next month
Videos viewed tens of thousands of times on TikTok and Facebook claim that the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has announced that from 1 December the UK will be subject to an “11pm stay-home rule”.
But this isn’t true. The government has not announced any such policy, and there’s no new law or policy stating this.
One video shared on Facebook says “starting December 1st 2025 [...] everyone will be expected to stay indoors unless they hold verified permission to travel” after 11pm. It says this supposed policy is to be introduced in order to “promote public safety, reduce late night activity and bring greater calm and structure to communities across the country”. It claims “shops, restaurants and transport services will close earlier”, and that specific groups, such as “medical teams” and “emergency responders” will need “approved travel clearance” in order to move freely after 11pm.
The audio resembles the voice of Mr Starmer, but doesn’t consistently match his natural cadence or intonation, and was almost certainly generated by AI (although we cannot completely rule out it being created by other means).
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A clip of Mr Starmer is also briefly included at the beginning of the video—but this appears to have been taken from a statement the PM made on Gaza earlier this year, where there was no mention of any stay-home rule.
Text overlaid in the top right corner of some versions of the video says “generated by AI”. Other text present on these videos says: “Breaking: UK introduces 11pm stay-home rule from December 1st - major national change confirmed” and many of the people commenting seem to think it is real.
We’ve seen other videos being shared on Facebook and TikTok making similar claims, and also using fake audio that resembles the voice of Mr Starmer (these, however, don’t include text saying they were AI-generated).
We found no evidence on gov.uk that any such curfew policy exists, and we couldn’t find any credible news reports about it either. Similarly, searches of Hansard, the record of what is said in Parliament, do not show any evidence of such an announcement, which you would expect with such a major policy.
Full Fact saw similar videos being shared on social media earlier this year. As we said at the time, while it may be obvious to some that the claims in the videos are false, the volume of shares and likes suggest some believe they are true. You can read more here about why we sometimes check claims that clearly seem false.
Even during Covid-19 lockdowns, nationwide curfews were not imposed by the UK government. However, several countries, including the Netherlands, Spain and France, as well as Quebec in Canada and states in Germany, did introduce curfews at various points during the pandemic.
These videos are part of a spate of false and misleading content about incoming changes to personal freedoms being shared online.
Before sharing information like this that you see on social media, first consider whether it comes from a verifiable and trustworthy source. Our toolkit can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the government has not announced any such policy.