What was claimed
Rishi Sunak plans to pay people £75,000 to leave the UK.
Our verdict
There are no such plans in the Conservative manifesto or other evidence this is true. The claim appears to have first been shared by a satirical account.
No evidence Rishi Sunak plans to pay people £75,000 to leave the UK
20 June 2024
Thousands of people have shared videos suggesting the Prime Minister and Conservative leader Rishi Sunak plans to pay people £75,000 to leave the UK.
One TikTok video has overlaid text saying: “Rishi offering 75k to leave UK”, while another says: “75k to leave the UK would you do this? Rishi Sunak new plans??”
A link to another TikTok video with the caption “Leaving the UK and getting £75k will be a new offer of the next govt Rishi Sunak [sic]” has been shared many times on Facebook.
This clip shows a photo of Mr Sunak with audio from a section of a TV debate on 4 June in which Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Sunak are speaking about tax. Mr Sunak does not mention anything about a supposed incentive to leave the UK in the audio clip.
The account sharing the video replied to some comments asking how to sign up for the policy, claiming it will be announced if the Conservatives are re-elected.
But we could find no evidence of Mr Sunak or the Conservative party planning any such policy.
While it was reported in May 2024 that a failed asylum seeker was paid £3,000 to go to Rwanda as part of a voluntary removals programme, there is no mention in the party’s 2024 manifesto—which sets out their policies if they were to win the general election—of people being paid £75,000 to leave the UK. You can find more of our work fact checking the party’s manifesto in our round-up.
In fact, the claim appears to have first been shared on TikTok in June 2023 by an account named Bull Nose News that describes itself as “satire/parody”. In this clip the narrator says Mr Sunak announced these plans “to make migration figures look better to the Conservative base”, and it ends with him supposedly accepting the money and leaving.
A YouTube account with the same name shared the clip on 4 June 2024 and published another video on 16 June in response to a fact check published by The Independent on the £75,000 claim saying: “Everything I say here is 100% completely true in my head”.
Bull Nose News told Full Fact: “The original tags make it clear that BNN is a satirical news organisation. As would be clear to anyone who has looked at any of the other content.”
It’s always worth checking whether claims you see online come from credible sources before sharing them. You can find more of our work covering claims relating to the general election on our live blog.
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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence of any such plans and the claim appears to come from a satirical account.