Politics Live

The Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for education, Munira Wilson, claimed in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme [2:41:47] this morning that families are “facing the highest tax burden since the second world war”. 

The so-called ‘tax burden’ refers to tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). While the financial year 2022/23 saw the highest tax burden since 1949—which had decreased marginally from 1948 when the records began—it fell slightly in the most recent year. The Office for Budget Responsibility has, however, forecast it to increase over each of the next five years to a near-record level. 

Other politicians have made a similar claim that the tax burden is at the highest level in over 70 years, which we’ve written about several times before. 

We’ve contacted the Liberal Democrats for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has called on political parties to use statistics with “intelligent transparency”, following days of scrutiny of the Conservatives’ claim that a Labour government would mean £2,000 higher taxes per working family.

We’ve written a full fact check on this figure, finding it to be unreliable and based on a number of questionable assumptions. We also published a blog post noting that the claim was not solely based on Treasury costings, after Rishi Sunak claimed during the 4 June TV debate that “independent Treasury officials have costed Labour’s policies and they amount to a £2,000 tax rise”. 

The OSR, which provides independent regulation of official statistics, said in its statement: “When distilling claims into a single number, the context should be sufficient to allow the average person to understand what it means and how significant it is.”

The OSR said it had not commented on the accuracy of the figure because its “remit focuses on official statistics produced by Government”. 

But it warned that someone hearing the figure would have “no way of knowing that this is an estimate summed together over four years”, and added: “We warned against this practice a few days ago, following its use in presenting prospective future increases in defence spending.”

We’ve asked the Conservative party for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

After the debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer on Tuesday, ITV’s Anushka Asthana challenged Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey on whether his party’s proposed share buyback scheme would raise £1.4 billion a year, saying the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) believed that because of the way people will change their behaviour, it will raise “next to nothing”.

A share buyback is a purchase by a company of its own shares. The Liberal Democrat policy proposes a 4% share buyback tax, paid by the 100 biggest corporations on the stock exchange, which the party claims “could raise around £1.4 billion a year” to pay for extending free school meals to an additional 900,000 children.

Mr Davey suggested he disagreed with the IFS analysis and claimed “last year if we had this share buyback scheme we would have raised £2.3 billion”. He also claimed the Liberal Democrat calculations “allowed for behavioural change”. 

In a press release the Lib Dems claimed that, based on current buyback levels, “a 4% tax would raise around £2.2bn a year”. It noted: “We have taken a cautious approach to account for potential changes in company behaviour, estimating it would raise around £1.4bn a year.”

Mr Davey also pointed to the success of a similar scheme in the US, saying “they raised a huge amount of money” through this approach.

Stuart Adam, a senior economist at the IFS, told Full Fact that he’d be “surprised if a 4% tax on share buybacks in the UK raised much revenue”. He added: “To a large extent I would expect companies simply to stop using share buybacks, and to pay dividends instead if they wanted to return money to shareholders. More importantly, however, there is no clear justification for the policy: it seems a particularly distortionary form of tax rise.”

The Liberal Democrats pointed Full Fact to their blog post on the policy and highlighted the think tank Institute for Public Policy Research’s (IPPR)  tweet welcoming the policy. 

The IPPR called for a share buyback tax in 2022 “to ensure that companies are not channelling profits to their shareholders at a time of national economic crisis”. 

However, they called for a 1% tax instead of 4%, and warned “levying a higher tax on buybacks is likely to discourage companies from repurchasing their own stock” so it is “fair to assume that the revenues raised from a buyback tax will change in line with the level at which they are taxed”. 

Separately, the Lib Dems have also promised to make personal care for the elderly and the disabled free, and raise care workers’ pay, which they estimate will cost £2.7 billion, funding it by “reversing tax cuts given to big banks” which they calculate will raise £4.3 billion a year. 

However, independent experts warn the policy is going to cost more than £2.7 billion. 

The King’s Fund welcomed the plan but cautioned “the true cost of reform will be much more than stated”. The Health Foundation estimated that introducing a Scottish-style model of ‘free personal care’ in England, similar to what the Liberal Democrats have suggested, could cost around £6 billion extra in 2026/27, rising to £7 billion by 2035/36.

When questioned about the policy yesterday on Newsnight [25:27] Sarah Olney, the Lib Dem treasury and business and industrial strategy spokesperson, said: “We are, I think, the only party that is really coming forward with a serious plan for social care”, adding: “We will be bringing forward our manifesto, obviously, in due course, it will be a fully costed manifesto.” 

Image courtesy of members.parliament.uk 

Rishi Sunak’s claim that Labour is planning tax rises of £2,000 per family dominated the front pages this morning, but that figure is now facing fresh scrutiny after the publication of a letter from a senior Treasury official. In last night’s TV debate, Mr Sunak claimed that “independent Treasury officials have costed Labour's policies and they amount to a £2,000 tax rise for every working family”. 

We are working on a full fact check of this figure, but Mr Sunak’s claim that it comes from independent Treasury officials is not entirely accurate and therefore misleading. 

The figure comes from a Conservative document called ‘Labour’s Tax Rises’ which looked at a list of Labour policies and calculated the difference between estimates for Labour’s “spending commitments” and “revenue raisers”. It then divided this by the number of working households to arrive at around £2,000. Many of the figures used by the Conservatives as part of these calculations do come from Treasury costings of opposition policies that were published earlier this year. But these Treasury estimates don’t “amount” to a £2,000 figure because some of the figures in the document come from other sources, and the Treasury was not involved in calculating the total figure.  

The Permanent Secretary for HM Treasury, James Bowler, wrote in a letter to Labour’s Darren Jones on 3 June that “civil servants were not involved in the production or presentation of the Conservative Party’s document ‘Labour’s Tax Rises’ or in the calculation of the total figure used”.

Mr Bowler went on to say “any costings derived from other sources or produced by other organisations should not be presented as having been produced by the Civil Service”. 

It’s also worth noting that while Treasury civil servants can be asked to do costings of opposition policies, these are usually based on assumptions from special advisers who are political appointees. The Institute for Government explains more about how this works here. 

Full Fact’s chief executive Chris Morris said: “It's clearly unacceptable to present your own analysis as conclusions of independent civil servants when it’s not. 

“Public trust in politics is hanging by a thread and a high-profile falsehood will turn even more people away from the democratic process. We want to see this corrected as soon as possible.”

Labour has rejected the Conservatives’ £2,000 figure, with Sir Keir Starmer describing the figure as “absolute garbage” in last night’s debate.

A Conservative party spokesperson told the BBC: “We were fair to Labour in the production of the Labour tax rise briefing note and used only clear Labour policies, their own costings or official HMT [HM Treasury] costings.”

Full Fact has contacted both the Conservative and Labour parties about this and will update here if they respond. 

We’ve just finished fact checking the first televised debate of the 2024 general election, which saw the Prime Minister and Conservative leader Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer go head-to-head.

The event took place on 4 June in front of a live audience in Salford, broadcast by ITV—you can watch it back on ITVX.

We’ve published an initial round-up of some of the claims we fact checked from the debate, covering tax, the NHS, education, defence, immigration and more. 

In the coming days we’ll be looking into a few more claims from tonight’s debate, as well as continuing to monitor the election campaign in the run-up to 4 July, ensuring you have access to information you can trust. Keep up to date on our website for the latest fact checks on candidates’ claims and explainers on key topics. 

Right now, Full Fact is getting ready to live fact check the very first head-to-head TV debate between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. 

We’ll be following tonight’s debate live, holding both politicians to account in real time and making sure voters have access to information they can trust. 

Once the debate is underway, our team of fact checkers will be monitoring claims with the help of our AI tools. We’re a small team, so it’s not possible for us to check every single claim, but if we can publish a quick verdict, we will.

With the live programme set to kick off at 9pm, you can follow our updates on X (formerly Twitter) here. You can get involved too—please tag the @FullFact account if there’s a claim you think we should be looking at. 

In a speech during a Reform UK general election event on 28 May, Nigel Farage appeared to claim that people arriving in the UK on small boats get new iPhones within 24 hours of arrival.

Mr Farage was the party’s honorary president, but has today announced he will stand for election and become leader of Reform UK.

He said: “I’ve filmed […] people throwing their iPhones into the sea, throwing their passports into the sea, doing everything they can so we can’t track and identify them. Although it’s okay, because they get an iPhone, a new one, within 24 hours of arrival.”

It’s unclear what this claim about people getting a new iPhone is based on. 

Full Fact investigated a similar claim back in February and we found that the Home Office does not generally provide asylum seekers with phones, though there have been some exceptions.

Around 14,000 mobile phones were reportedly given to asylum seekers during the pandemic as immigration staff were unable to interview individuals face to face because of Covid-19 restrictions. However, this was a temporary measure.

Asylum seekers do not receive phones as part of their standard support package from the Home Office, though a number of charities do provide donated phones to new arrivals to make it easier for them to contact solicitors and monitor the progress of their claims. 

This means it’s possible some asylum seekers could end up with iPhones, though we’ve not seen any specific reports of this. If so, the phones are unlikely to be new as phones donated by charities appear to be typically second-hand, and donated phones are not available to everyone. 

We asked Reform UK for a source or evidence to support the claim, and we will update this blog if we get a response.

Image courtesy of Tron Le

The Labour candidate for High Peak in Derbyshire, Jon Pearce, has said there are “nearly 8 million people on NHS waiting lists”, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that has also been shared by the shadow ministers Wes Streeting and Jonathan Reynolds.

As we’ve said many times before, including when Mr Streeting made a similar claim last week, this is not what NHS data shows. There are actually about 6.3 million people in the most recently published referral to treatment (RTT) data for NHS England, which is what claims about ”NHS waiting lists” or “the waiting list” usually refer to.

There are about 7.5 million cases on the RTT list, which may well be what Mr Pearce was talking about.

There are always more cases than people in the NHS data, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing—although the estimated number of people wasn’t published until November 2023. Now that it is, we think politicians and the media should use the correct figure.

An important caveat here is that there are several different kinds of waiting list, so the RTT data doesn’t include everyone waiting for anything.

In April, the Office of National Statistics published the results of a survey, which suggested that almost 10 million adults in England were waiting for something on the NHS. 

We’ve approached Mr Pearce, Mr Streeting and Mr Reynolds for comment.