Fact checking Labour’s ‘missions’

In the last couple of weeks we’ve looked into two claims published in a document outlining the Labour party’s five “national missions”, reportedly the party’s election “campaigning bible”.

On 26 January, we checked a claim that there have been “4,000 GPs cut” under the Conservative government. 

Labour hasn’t responded to our questions about this claim, but this figure is unreliable, because Labour appear to have reached it by comparing the current data with a different, non-comparable dataset from before 2015.

If you date the current period of Conservative government from 2015, when the party won a majority in the House of Commons, then the number of fully qualified GPs has fallen by nearly 2,000—although the total including those in training has risen by about 3,000.

There appears to be no reliable way to compare with the number of GPs doing NHS work earlier than that—for example, with 2010, when the whole period of Conservative-led government began—because NHS Digital changed the way it counts GP numbers in 2015.

Labour’s document also said there are “2.98 million people now using food banks, up from 60,000 in 2010”—a claim we’ve also seen made elsewhere.

The Trussell Trust—the largest food bank network in the UK—confirmed to Full Fact that these figures show the number of emergency food parcels it distributed in 2022/23 and 2010/11, not the number of individual people using food banks. That means they could double-count people who use a food bank more than once, and also fail to count people who use food banks which aren’t run by the Trussell Trust.

We’ve not been able to find a reliable estimate for the number of people using food banks currently. Data published by the government suggests that in the 2021/22 financial year approximately two million people lived in a household where a food bank has been used—however use has clearly increased substantially in recent years, with 760,000 people accessing Trussell Trust food banks for the first time in 2022/23.