BBC’s seven-party election debate: fact checked
This evening we’ve been fact checking politicians from seven parties as they took part in the BBC’s first televised debate of the 2024 general election.
Appearing were the Conservative party’s Penny Mordaunt; Labour’s Angela Rayner; the Green Party’s Carla Denyer; the Liberal Democrats’ Daisy Cooper; the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorworth and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage.
Ms Mordaunt repeated a claim we’ve seen several times from the Conservatives so far this election—she said Labour is going to put taxes up by “£2,000 per working household”. This figure is unreliable and based on a number of questionable assumptions. The Office for Statistics Regulation has also issued a statement criticising the Conservatives’ use of this figure.
Then Ms Rayner claimed there have been 26 tax rises under the Conservatives. This is similar to a claim we’ve looked at before—it’s not clear how Labour arrived at this figure and they’ve not published their workings.
Mr Farage claimed the so-called ‘tax burden’ is the “highest in this country since 1948”.
It’s true that the ‘tax burden’—which refers to tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product—was the highest since the late 1940s in 2022/23. It’s since fallen slightly, but is forecast to increase over the next five years to a near-record level. We wrote about this last month.
During a discussion about the NHS, Mr Flynn claimed £18 billion of public sector “cuts” are “coming down the line”.
This was the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ estimate in March of the real-terms reductions in spending “unprotected” government departments could face by 2028/29. However, the IFS has also said there’s uncertainty around the exact figures, as there aren’t published spending plans beyond this year.
It now estimates unprotected budgets could face reductions of between £10 billion and £20 billion by 2028/29. This doesn’t appear to include the NHS however, as its budget is ‘protected’.
Finally, Ms Mordaunt claimed the Conservatives had met their 2019 manifesto commitment of “20,000 more police officers”. That’s true, but it comes after a substantial decline in police numbers between 2010 and 2018.
We wrote more about these figures back in March. As of September 2023, there were 3,134 more police officers in England and Wales than in 2010.