Politics Live

It’s been a busy year for Full Fact’s politics team. 

In 2024 we’ve covered a whole series of major political events, including, of course, July’s general election, as well as two Budgets, the autumn party conferences and a Conservative leadership election. 

Oh, and there was an election on the other side of the Atlantic too. 

In November we were excited to launch our Government Tracker, to monitor progress on the government’s delivery against its promises. We’ll be keeping this up to date in the coming weeks and months—today we’ve just updated the page covering Labour’s pledge on more NHS appointments to reflect the latest data—and we’ll be adding new pledges too. All alongside our regular work to call out false or misleading claims by, or about, politicians. 

We’re now taking a break over Christmas, but there’ll be lots to pick up when we return in 2025. In the meantime we wish our readers a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Sir Keir Starmer has been facing calls to correct the record after a claim he made at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions about two former PMs having “convictions”.

In the exchange on 4 December, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch asked about the departure of Louise Haigh from the role of transport secretary, after it emerged Ms Haigh had pleaded guilty to a fraud offence prior to becoming an MP. Mr Starmer replied to Ms Badenoch saying: “I gently remind her that two of her predecessors had convictions for breaking the Covid rules.”

Mr Starmer was referring to the Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in April 2022 for breaking lockdown rules during the Covid pandemic. 

His comments have been widely criticised, with Ms Badenoch and Mr Johnson suggesting that he misled the House.

It is true, as was widely reported in the wake of Mr Starmer’s comments last week, that FPNs are not classed as criminal convictions. They do not result in a criminal record so long as they are paid within a set time limit. 

Mr Starmer did not actually refer to “criminal convictions” though, just “convictions”, so we’ve taken some time to look further into how that term is used. (It’s worth noting Mr Starmer has reportedly used the same wording previously.)

The evidence we’ve seen generally appears to suggest Mr Starmer’s use of the word “conviction” was misleading, though we’ve not been able to find a universally agreed definition of the term. We’ve asked Number 10 about his comments but not had any response, so we’ve today written to Mr Starmer about his claim.

FPNs were first introduced under the Road Traffic and Roads Improvement Act 1960. Announcing them in the Commons, transport minister Ernest Marples said: “If the person pays the penalty there will be no conviction and no sentence.”

This was echoed in the wording of the Covid rules—for example, 

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 3) Regulations 2020 stated: “A fixed penalty notice is a notice offering the person to whom it is issued the opportunity of discharging any liability to conviction for the offence by payment of a fixed penalty to an authority specified in the notice.”

A 2010 finding by the Court of Appeal Criminal Division [R v Hamer [2010] EWCA Crim 2053] held that an FPN under the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 should not be regarded as a conviction. The case was quoted in Parliament in defence of Mr Johnson in the aftermath of his Covid fine. 

When we asked the Ministry of Justice, it told us there is no universally agreed definition of a conviction, but that FPNs are ‘out of court disposals’. Official statistics published by the Ministry of Justice do not appear to include Fixed Penalty Notices in their count of the number of convictions.

A Home Office guide to police powers defines a “conviction” as “when a person is found guilty of an offence in a court”, which does not apply to FPNs. And when we asked the Metropolitan Police, the force which issued the Covid fines to Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak, it told us: “A[n] FPN is not a conviction.” 

Professor David Ormerod KC, Chair in Criminal Law at UCL, told us he was “confident that FPNs are not treated as convictions”, but added: “In common discourse I suspect people do regard FPN and PNDs [Penalty Notices for Disorder] as convictions of a sort.”

Stuart Nolan, chair of the Law Society’s Criminal Law Committee, told us his “personal view” was that “an FPN is a de-facto conviction”. Mr Nolan said this was because they were “a sanction imposed for an offence which they did not contest, exercised in a criminal jurisdiction”, though he also acknowledged that it was “debatable whether [the FPNs] would be considered ‘convictions’ by most people”.

The letter we’ve written to Mr Starmer asks him to justify his use of the term “conviction”, or to correct the record. We will publish an update on this blog when we hear back.

An article about NHS England targets in the Times on Monday reported that hospital waiting lists “mean 7.6 million people are in line for treatment”.

As we’ve said many times before, this is not quite right. The 7.6 million figure refers to the number of cases on the waiting list, not the number of people.

In fact in the latest referral-to-treatment (RTT) data, which covers the end of September 2024, there were about 6.3 million people on the waiting list.

As NHS England explains in a note on its interactive report: “Each ‘case’ is an RTT pathway which relates to an individual referral for a patient. A patient can be on more than one RTT pathway at the same time if they are waiting for consultant-led elective treatment for different conditions or unrelated clinical reasons. Some patients will therefore be included in the figures above more than once.”

Our AI tools have spotted versions of this mistake more than 50 times in the past year.

NHS England’s RTT data doesn’t cover everyone waiting for any kind of NHS service, but it’s what people usually mean by “the waiting list”. Survey data collected by the Office for National Statistics last winter found that about 25% of adults in Great Britain were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”. 

We approached the Times for comment.

On BBC Question Time last night, skills minister Jacqui Smith, Baroness Smith of Malvern, appeared to repeat a claim we’ve already heard from the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, that Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said she wouldn’t reverse the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions. 

However, as we’ve already pointed out, there’s no evidence that Ms Badenoch said this. 

Baroness Smith said to shadow housing secretary Kevin Hollinrake: “Your leader said she wasn’t going to reverse the National Insurance changes”. (While this isn’t perfectly audible, we believe this is what she said and have asked her for confirmation).  

Mr Hollinrake immediately replied: “That’s not what she said at all, Jacqui”.

Last month, when asked if she would reverse the policy, Ms Badenoch didn’t say if she would or wouldn’t do that. She said if something had been introduced in the Autumn Budget that “will obviously not work and will not raise any money, we will change that”. 

Later, she said “one of the first things that we’re going to be doing when we start our policy platform” is “look again” at employers’ National Insurance. 

We’ve written to Baroness Smith asking for her evidence for this claim, and will update this post if we receive a response.

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The Treasury and Department for Work and Pensions minister Emma Reynolds said on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? on Friday: “The situation that we inherited which is seven and a half million people waiting on waiting lists for operations.” [27:30]

This mixes up the number of people on the NHS England waiting list with the number of cases—a common mistake we’ve seen many times before, and which our AI tools have spotted at least 50 times in the past year.

In fact, in July 2024, the month of the general election, there were about 6.4 million people on the waiting list, according to non-emergency referral-to-treatment (RTT) data, in a total of about 7.6 million cases. Some people are waiting for treatment for more than one thing, so there are always more cases than people. 

Cases on the waiting list are also not necessarily waits “for operations”, as Ms Reynolds said. Although some people will be admitted for surgery, others may receive medicine, equipment or advice to help with their condition, or a decision might be taken to monitor their progress, or not to treat them at all.

NHS England’s RTT data doesn’t cover everyone waiting for any kind of NHS service, but it’s what people usually mean by “the waiting list”. Survey data collected by the Office for National Statistics last winter found that about 25% of adults in Great Britain were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”. 

We approached Ms Reynolds for comment.

We’ve seen some confusion online following Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s claim today that “spiking will be made a criminal offence”, with some commentators saying this is already the case or accusing him of “sloppy and misleading” wording.

‘Spiking’ involves adding either alcohol or drugs to drinks without the drinker’s knowledge or consent (‘drink spiking’), or injecting someone with drugs or another substance without their knowledge or consent (‘needle spiking’).

As this Home Office fact sheet from last December makes clear, spiking is already a crime. The government’s announcement today suggests that spiking will become a specific offence—though that wasn’t made clear in Mr Starmer’s post on X.

Currently spiking may be prosecuted under a number of existing laws, including:

• Offences against the Person Act 1861
• Sexual Offences Act 2003
• Criminal Justice Act 1988.

However, none of these laws include a specific offence of ‘spiking’ or appear to directly use the term. Instead, spiking can currently be prosecuted under a number of broader offences, such as “maliciously administering poison” so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm or “administering a substance with intent” to engage in a non-consensual sexual activity.

Speaking to ITN, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls Jess Phillips MP said: “Currently spiking sits across various different pieces of legislation and isn’t necessarily that easy to spot and also charge in criminal law, so we’re going to introduce a new crime of spiking.”

In response to claims that difficulties in tackling spiking did not stem from inadequate legislation, Ms Phillips told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme [starts 1:36:00] that “new legislation in and of itself won’t necessarily change anything” but that the government was also announcing changes to the way police and bar staff deal with spiking incidents.

In a report on spiking published in December 2023 the previous government decided not to create a new “bespoke” offence, but did commit to amending its Criminal Justice Bill to “modernise the language of the current offence(s) which may help increase public awareness of the illegality of spiking and encourage the reporting of such incidents”.

These changes were introduced in January 2024, but the Bill did not pass ahead of the general election.

An article in the Independent today said: “During World War 1, parts of the UK’s countryside were destroyed amid bombing and fighting. But bright red poppies flourished in the muddy fields and inspired a poem by Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae.”

The article goes on to say that this poem, In Flanders Fields, inspired the adoption of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

This is correct, according to the Royal British Legion, except of course the poem is not about fighting in the UK countryside, but in Flanders, which is part of Belgium. (Others made this point on social media.)

Although the UK was one of the belligerents, and thousands of people in the UK were killed or wounded in air raids, the first world war was primarily fought in other countries.

The Independent quickly corrected the article following contact from Full Fact.

Josh MacAlister is the first MP newly elected in 2024 to correct an error following a request from Full Fact.

Full Fact’s AI tools detected a message on Mr MacAlister’s Facebook page on 29 October that inaccurately said “over 7.5 million people” were waiting for NHS treatment when the Conservatives left office. After we contacted Mr MacAlister, he corrected the figure.

According to data provided by NHS England, there were 7.6 million cases involving about 6.4 million people waiting for treatment when the Conservatives left office. Some patients await treatment for more than one thing, as our explainer on NHS waiting lists shows.

Our AI has detected over 50 claims confusing waiting lists data on patients and cases in the last year.

We’re very grateful to Mr MacAlister for making the correction.