The Autumn Statement—and another busy day in Westminster

It’s been a hectic few weeks in politics, what with the King’s Speech, London protests, Cabinet reshuffle, vote on a Gaza ceasefire and more, and today promises another big moment, as the chancellor unveils his Autumn Statement. 

On days such as this the Full Fact team steps up its monitoring of political claims, while continuing our work tackling health and online misinformation as well. 

Right now, our fact checkers are doing their usual morning monitoring—reading the newspapers, listening to the broadcast round, scanning social media and checking tips from readers, looking for claims we should investigate further (or have already fact checked previously). 

Unsurprisingly pre-Autumn Statement speculation dominates the political news agenda this morning—much of it is based on off-the-record briefings or informed guesswork, which isn’t fact checkable, but we’re looking for statements of fact which might be. 

At 12pm Prime Minister's Questions—normally a focal point of the political week, but today more a warm-up for the main event—gets underway. We monitor this in real time, with a team of five or six fact checkers updating a collaborative Google Doc with claims as they are made, initial analysis of claims and, where we can, verdicts. 

We also use Full Fact’s AI tools to scan for claims we can instantly match and provide a transcript. Any immediate fact checks we can publish will go out via X (formerly Twitter) and this live blog too. 

Then at around 12.40pm we’ll move on to monitoring the Autumn Statement itself. This will likely involve a slightly smaller team, as fact checkable claims are likely to be more spaced out, amidst a blizzard of Treasury-approved numbers and forward-looking pledges. We’ll be ready to scan the underlying Treasury documents too, when they’re published—and keep a close eye on media and social media reaction to identify claims which may be challenged and deserve further scrutiny. 

A busy day then. Stay tuned…