Spring Statement 2025: fact checked

On Wednesday 26 March the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered her Spring Statement in the House of Commons. 

We’ve taken a look at a number of claims from her statement, and the Conservative response.  

Did Labour keep its promise to ‘working people’ on National Insurance?

Ms Reeves claimed that in the Autumn Budget the government had “protected working people by keeping our promise not to raise their rates of National Insurance, income tax or VAT”. This is a claim we’ve heard many times before from Labour, but it is disputed.

While no changes to VAT or employee National Insurance contributions (NICs) were announced in the Budget last October, the government did increase employer NICs. This led to accusations that Labour had broken its manifesto commitment, which said the party would “not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase National Insurance”.

As our Government Tracker explains, Labour did not set out a clear definition of “working people” in its manifesto, and did not specify whether its pledge on National Insurance referred to both employee and employer NICs, or just one of these.

As a result, some commentators, including the Institute for Fiscal Studies, have suggested the increase in employer NICs represents a breach of this commitment. However ministers have claimed the commitment to not increasing taxes on “working people” referred to taxes in people’s payslips—based on this definition, the government would currently be keeping its pledge. 

Given this uncertainty, we can’t definitively say whether Labour’s “promise” has or hasn’t been kept, and our Government Tracker is rating it as “unclear or disputed”. But this kind of ambiguity isn’t good enough—as we set out in our manifesto standards ahead of the election, manifestos should define things clearly and consistently and be phrased in a way that a reasonable person is likely to understand.

No further changes to NICs or any other taxes were announced in today’s statement.

Did the Conservatives leave a £22 billion ‘black hole’?

Ms Reeves also said the Conservatives had “left a £22 billion black hole in our nation’s finances”, and repeated that claim later in her statement.

We’ve heard this figure used by the government many times since Labour won last year’s general election, and have written before about where it comes from. 

The figure was originally reported in a Treasury audit of the public finances, undertaken in July 2024 after the election. The audit forecast a £22 billion overspend in departmental day-to-day spending this year (2024/25), but the extent to which this was unexpected or inherited from the previous government has been disputed. 

Following the conclusion of an Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) review into its March 2024 forecast, several Conservative politicians have referred to OBR chair Richard Hughes’ comment that “nothing in our review was a legitimisation of that £22 billion [figure]”. Shadow chancellor Mel Stride also alluded to this today in his reply to the chancellor’s statement. We’ve written more about what the OBR’s review found here. 

How is defence spending changing?

Ms Reeves’ statement made several references to global uncertainty and an “uncertain world”, which she said is why the government has made a commitment for defence spending to reach 2.5% of GDP from 2027.

Today’s statement detailed that defence spending next year, which had been due to rise by £2.9 billion, will increase by an additional £2.2 billion. The Treasury says this will take spending on defence to 2.36% of GDP next year. 

In February, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the government had an ambition for defence spending to reach 3% of GDP “in the next Parliament”. The OBR today said this would “cost an additional £17.3 billion in 2029-30”. 

While Conservative shadow chancellor Mel Stride said in his response to the Spring Statement today that his party supported the decision for defence spending to reach 2.5% of GDP by 2027, he also said: “We should go further than that. The 3% target should be brought forward to this parliament.” 

In reply, Ms Reeves said the Conservatives “had 14 years to increase defence spending and now they lately come to the party”. This doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Defence spending was 2.5% of GDP in 2010, but decreased to 2% in 2015. It then increased to 2.4% in 2020, before dropping to 2.3%, where it has been since 2021.

In our defence spending explainer, we’ve taken a closer look at how the UK’s defence spending has changed over time, and where the 2.5% target for NATO-qualifying spend comes from.

Has Ms Reeves broken her commitment on borrowing?

In his response to the Spring Statement shadow chancellor Mel Stride said Ms Reeves “is the chancellor who said she would not increase borrowing, but she did”.

It’s not clear exactly what he was referring to here—we’ve asked the Conservatives and will update this fact check when we hear back.

Labour has set out fiscal rules which currently require the government to be forecast to have a current budget surplus by 2029/30 (meaning that at that point borrowing won’t be used to fund day-to-day spending). The rules do allow it to be forecast to be borrowing to invest however (for example, to fund its Green Prosperity Plan).

The OBR today forecast that the government will meet its current budget target in 2029/30, though overall net borrowing that year is now forecast to be higher than the OBR estimated it would be back in October.

We also have data on borrowing which has already happened, as opposed to future forecast borrowing. 

The latest figures published by the Office for National Statistics show that in February 2025 public sector borrowing was £10.7 billion—more than forecast and £0.1 billion higher than in February 2024. Over this period borrowing for day-to-day spending decreased by £1 billion, with the overall increase in borrowing driven by net investment (capital spending), which rose by £1.1 billion.

Have waiting lists fallen five months running?

Ms Reeves also said that record investment in the NHS was “bringing waiting lists down for five months in a row”.

When people talk about “the waiting list”, they generally mean the “referral to treatment”, or RTT, waiting list for England specifically, because this is the part of the health service that the UK government controls.

It’s true that January 2025, the latest month for which we have figures, saw the fifth consecutive monthly fall in the total number of cases on the waiting list for NHS England. 

However, the same is not quite true of the number of people on the waiting list awaiting treatment. (As some people are receiving treatment for more than one condition, the number of overall cases on the list is always slightly higher than the number of individual people awaiting treatment.)

The number of people on the NHS England waiting list was broadly flat in September and October 2024 at 6.34 million. It then fell, to 6.24 million in December 2024, but rose very slightly to 6.25 million in January 2025.  

Our explainer looks at changes in the number of cases and patients on the waiting list since Labour took office. It also examines how the time you may spend on a waiting list can vary according to the time of year, the part of the country you are based in and the kind of treatment you are receiving.