Green Party 2024 manifesto: fact checked
On 12 June, the Green Party launched its 2024 manifesto.
Our fact checking team has been combing through the 48-page document with the help of Full Fact’s AI tools, and we’ve looked at a couple of claims.
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NHS waiting lists
In a section titled “Building A Fairer, Healthier Country”, the manifesto claims there are “nearly 8 million of us on hospital waiting lists”. But, as we’ve written many times before, that’s not what NHS data shows.
Assuming the claims relate to the NHS in England (which the UK government controls) and the referral to treatment (RTT) data, which is usually what people mean by “the waiting list”, then the “nearly eight million” figure is not the number of people waiting, but the number of cases.
The latest published NHS England RTT data at the time of writing shows about 6.3 million people were waiting to begin about 7.5 million courses of treatment at the end of March 2024. (New waiting list data is due out on Thursday 12 June.)
The number of cases is higher than the number of people, because some people are waiting for more than one course of treatment.
We asked the Green Party about its use of this figure and it told us it would not be commenting.
Home insulation and energy bills
During the launch event for the manifesto, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said the UK’s energy bills are “still sky-high because we have the worst insulated homes in Europe”. The online version of the manifesto included a similar claim, saying: “Our energy bills are far too high because we have the worst-insulated homes in Europe.”
However the wording in the longer PDF version of the manifesto was less definitive, claiming “most people’s energy bills are unnecessarily high because the UK has the worst insulated homes in Europe”.
Poorer home insulation in the UK (especially relative to the rest of Europe) is one of several factors contributing to high energy bills here. However, the large rise in bills in 2022 and 2023 were driven by increased demand for oil and gas following the end of lockdown and by the high cost of gas after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Domestic energy prices have come down more recently, though UK energy bills remain higher than they did prior to the invasion.