Sir Keir Starmer’s first major campaign speech, fact checked
This morning Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer addressed voters in West Sussex for his first keynote speech of the 2024 general election campaign, and took questions from the media afterwards. We’ve looked at several claims he made.
Mr Starmer twice mentioned the amount spent on the government’s Rwanda policy, claiming that “it’s cost £600 million” and that the “Prime Minister has spent £600 million”. But part of this figure appears to refer to future costs, rather than the amount that has already been spent.
A National Audit Office (NAO) report published in March found the Home Office will pay £370 million to the Rwandan government with a further £20,000 for every individual who is relocated and £120 million once 300 people have been relocated, as well as further processing and operational costs.
Analysis of the NAO report by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford estimated the total cost of relocating 500 people to Rwanda would be £625 million.
This does not include the possible financial implications for other government departments, or wider costs such as expanding detention facilities necessary to hold people before they are relocated.
We’ve contacted both Labour and the government about the £600 million figure and will update this blog if we receive a response.
Mr Starmer also claimed in his speech that “chaos” under the Conservatives was “hitting every working family to the tune of £5,000”.
It’s not clear where this £5,000 figure comes from—we’ve asked Labour.
We did see that figure referenced in a different way in a speech in March by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. She cited an estimate that the UK economy would have been £140 billion larger had it grown over the past decade in line with the average across the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), and said this would have been equivalent to £5,000 per household.
If so, people being £5,000 worse off compared to a hypothetical scenario is not the same as people actually losing £5,000 in real terms, and it’s worth noting Mr Starmer’s claim was also about working families rather than households. So the figure may come from somewhere else entirely—we’ll update this blog if Labour comes back to us with more information.
Mr Starmer also repeated a claim we’ve heard many times before—that the UK army is the smallest it has been since the Napoleonic Wars.
As we’ve written in our explainer on the size of the UK’s armed forces, the present number of personnel in the British Army is comparable to the period shortly after the Napoleonic wars. That said, the data that far back is not entirely reliable and there are many different ways of counting serving personnel.
Finally, another claim made by Mr Stamer was that taxes are "higher than at any time since the war". We’ve seen versions of this claim a lot recently from Labour politicians, including shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this month and shadow education minister Bridget Phillipson on the BBC’s Today programme this morning [2:28:20].
While the so-called “tax burden”—which refers to tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP)— was at the highest level in over 70 years in 2022/23, it fell slightly in 2023/24. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has forecast that it will rise to near-record levels over the next five years.