Keir Starmer at PMQs: five times we fact checked the outgoing PM
This week Sir Keir Starmer faces his last Prime Minister’s Questions before leaving office.
Full Fact has monitored every PMQs session this Parliament, and fact checked a number of claims Mr Starmer made. We’ve collected a few that stand out.
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Covid ‘convictions’
In December 2024 we wrote to the Prime Minister after he said during PMQs that two former Conservative leaders “had convictions for breaking the Covid rules”.
As far as we could tell, Mr Starmer’s use of the word “conviction” wasn’t the right way to describe the Fixed Penalty Notices that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak received. But we weren’t able to find a universally agreed definition of the term.
Migration confusion
In consecutive PMQs in February 2025 Mr Starmer appeared to confuse net migration figures with immigration figures, claiming that immigration had “reached almost one million a year”.
In fact, the “nearly one million” figure appears to refer to net migration (the number of long-term immigrants minus the number of long-term emigrants), which in the year to March 2023 reached a record high of approximately 944,000. The record for immigration specifically was almost 1.5 million.
Living standards
In May 2025 Mr Starmer claimed that under the previous Conservative government “living standards were at an all-time low”.
We looked into this, and it wasn’t right. None of the most commonly used ways to measure living standards showed it reached an “all-time low” at any point under the previous Conservative or Conservative-led coalition governments.
Mr Starmer might have been thinking of growth in living standards, which was the weakest on record on at least one measure during the last parliament, with other measures showing actual falls. The Resolution Foundation told Full Fact at the time that the Prime Minister “clearly misspoke”.
More teachers?
In December 2025 the Prime Minister claimed that the number of teachers in England was “more than when the Conservatives left office”.
This wasn’t true, based on the available school workforce census data at the time. This showed that there were around 400 fewer FTE teachers in England overall in November 2024 (the first figures showing the number of teachers under Labour) than in November 2023 (the last figures under the Conservatives).
The government has pledged to recruit 6,500 more teachers specifically in secondary and special schools and further education, so not including those in primary or nursery schools. The number of these teachers has increased so it’s possible Mr Starmer had this in mind.
Defence spending
Addressing questions about the government’s defence spending plans in March 2026, Mr Starmer claimed that Labour was “delivering the biggest boost to defence spending since the Cold War, £270 billion over the course of this Parliament”.
This figure was roughly the total the government expected to spend on defence over the course of the Parliament—not how much extra it planned to spend. So it didn’t describe the “boost” itself.