Politics Live

Reform UK has claimed in a paid Facebook ad that 14 million people will arrive in the UK in the next 12 years, but that’s not what official forecasts show.

The 14 million figure appears to be based on ONS national population projections, but those cover a 15 year period starting in mid-2021.

The ONS has confirmed to Full Fact that its projections indicate that 10.4 million will immigrate to the UK between now and mid-2036.

It’s important to be clear that immigration figures alone don’t show how migration impacts population growth.

When looking at net migration—that is, the number of people entering a country minus the number of people leaving—the ONS forecasts that the population will grow by around 4.5 million over the next 12 years.

Read the full fact check here.

Full Fact’s work to fact check manifestos continues, after Scottish First Minister and Scottish National Party leader John Swinney MSP launched his party’s offering in Edinburgh this morning. 

We’ve been checking the 32-page document with the help of Full Fact’s AI tools, and identifying key claims to investigate. 

Have a read of what we’ve looked at so far here, with more to follow. 

A claim we’ve heard repeated by Scottish politicians over the election campaign is that one in six or seven Scots are on NHS waiting lists. 

These figures are based on statistics published by Public Health Scotland (PHS), that track the number of ongoing waits for outpatient appointments, for inpatient or day case admissions, and for eight key diagnostic tests. It’s reached by combining the number of waits on each of these three lists, then dividing that by Scotland’s estimated population. 

But this misrepresents the data. PHS says this calculation shouldn’t be done as some patients are counted more than once on these lists if they’re waiting for multiple things. The total cases on these lists is 840,000 but this doesn’t reflect the number of people waiting. 

We don’t know exactly how many individuals, or what proportion of Scotland’s population, is on an NHS waiting list because PHS doesn’t provide this data.

You can read more about this here. 

We’ve noticed several headline figures used by the Conservatives during the general election campaign that sound like they may refer to an annual amount, but which actually represent a number of years added together. 

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has criticised this practice in the past, when it is not made clear, and it’s something everyone should look out for.

One high-profile example is the Conservatives’ claim that a Labour government would raise taxes by £2,000 for working families. As we’ve explained in our full fact check on the figure—which for various reasons we found to be unreliable—it has been calculated to represent the additional tax families would supposedly pay over the next four years under Labour, not in a single year, as someone might reasonably assume. 

A statement by the OSR noted how “someone hearing the claim would have no way of knowing that this is an estimate summed together over four years.”

Similarly, the Conservatives’ claim that Labour’s pension plans would result in a “£1,000 retirement tax” is based on the Conservatives’ analysis of the cumulative amount that the average pensioner would pay between 2025/26 and 2029/30 under the party’s “triple lock plus” policy. But we’ve seen this figure reported in ways that don’t make it clear that it would be spread over multiple years.  

Again, we’ve unpacked the numbers behind this specific claim in our fact check, and you can read more about the impact of the “triple lock plus” in our explainer. 

Another example is the Conservatives’ plan to increase defence spending by an “additional £75 billion” by 2030. While this is the sum of all additional spending over the next six years, it has sometimes been presented as a standalone figure, without making this clear.

A 2022 House of Commons Library briefing, which has since been archived, said this is “not how increases and decreases in spending are usually discussed”. 

There are other problems with the figure that we’ve also explained before. 

The OSR’s statement said that it had “warned against this practice” before and called for all political leaders to use statistics with “intelligent transparency”. 

It said: “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.”

Full Fact has written fact checks about this practice before in 2022 and 2018. 

So when you hear big numbers quoted during the election campaign, it’s worth checking whether they are annual or cumulative. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more examples, from the Conservatives or anyone else. 

We’ve contacted the Conservative party for comment and will update our Election Live blog if we receive a response.

Update: We’ve updated this blog post to reflect the year in which the Conservative party’s proposed “triple lock plus” policy would take effect. 

Reform UK launched its 2024 ‘contract’ today which is, essentially, the party’s manifesto.

With the help of Full Fact’s AI tools, we’ve been combing through the 28-page document and checking its key claims. 

Find out what we’ve been looking into in our round-up here.

In multiple interviews this morning defence secretary Grant Shapps claimed “every Labour government in history” has left unemployment higher.

This isn’t the first time Mr Shapps has made this claim—we fact checked him last year after he said the same thing.

As we wrote then, this is true of most Labour governments, including the two most recent ones (1997-2010 and 1974-1979), both of which saw unemployment increase. 

These are the only Labour governments covered by currently comparable unemployment data, but historic unemployment data, while not directly comparable with current data, suggests there’s at least one exception to this claim, with unemployment falling during the Labour minority government of 1924.

In addition, though it wasn‘t a “Labour government” as such, it’s worth noting that between May 1940 and May 1945 the Labour party was part of the wartime government, led by Sir Winston Churchill, which left unemployment lower than when it came in. The unemployment rate dropped from 5.5% in May 1940 to 0.7% in May 1945.

Some Conservative governments have also seen rises in unemployment. When we looked at this issue back in 2021, we found that of the three completed periods of Conservative government since the war, at least two had seen increases. 

Unemployment is currently lower than it was when the Conservatives entered government as part of the Coalition in 2010.

On today’s morning politics shows we spotted some familiar claims we’ve previously fact checked. 

On Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips [7:04 and 16:57], Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting twice mentioned “the 7.5 million” on waiting lists. 

While Mr Streeting did not specify whether he meant people or cases on waiting lists, as we’ve written before, 7.5 million was the number of cases, not people, on NHS England waiting lists. 

The latest data, collected at the end of April 2024, shows about 6.3 million people were waiting to begin about 7.6 million courses of treatment.

And on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Mr Streeting referred to “the kind of unfunded gimmicks we have seen in this Conservative election campaign which could see people’s mortgages go up by £4,800”. 

As we explained a few days ago, this is a speculative figure, which seems to be an estimate of the average annual extra cost of a mortgage at the end of the next parliament. It is based on several uncertain assumptions, and some of the detail of Labour’s workings remains unclear.

For the Conservatives, transport secretary Mark Harper told Laura Kuenssberg that under Labour there would be a “retirement tax where you would have to pay tax on the basic state pension”. This is based on forecasts showing that under current government policy the new state pension is set to increase slightly above the personal allowance for the first time. 

Labour says it’ll maintain current government policy and not raise the personal allowance, while the Conservatives say they will introduce a new age-related personal allowance that grows each year so that it will “always be higher than the level of the new state pension”. We wrote about this earlier this month. 

Mr Harper also said on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips [33:07] that under Labour there would be a “black hole” of “£2,000 for every family in the next, over the parliament”. As we’ve explained before, this figure is unreliable and based on a number of questionable assumptions. 

The Office for Statistics Regulation has also issued a statement criticising the Conservatives’ use of this figure.

We’ve been taking a look at some of the adverts political parties have been running on Facebook—and have found a number making claims we’ve previously fact checked.

A Facebook advert for Alex Fawbert, the Labour candidate for Boston and Skegness, ran between 6 and 10 June and received between 2,000 and 3,000 impressions, according to Facebook’s ad library. In the video featured in the ad, Ms Fawbert said: “We know that there are eight million people currently on waiting lists.” We’ve heard similar claims to this throughout the campaign, from Labour and the Green party. But as we’ve written before, it’s not what NHS data shows. 

Assuming Ms Fawbert was talking about NHS England (which is the part of the NHS the UK government controls) and referral to treatment (RTT) data, which is usually what people mean by “the waiting list”, then it appears she was referring not to the number of people on waiting lists but the number of cases, and it’s been rounded up to eight million.

In the latest NHS England data, collected at the end of April 2024, about 6.3 million people were waiting to begin about 7.6 million courses of treatment. (At the time the ad started, the latest data, for March 2024, said 6.3 million people and 7.5 million cases.) There are always more cases than people in the data, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing.

Meanwhile, an advert for Labour’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip candidate Danny Beales claimed that under the Conservatives “waiting lists will go up and up and hit 10 million”. 

While it’s impossible to say for sure what’ll happen in future, as we wrote a couple of weeks ago, that prediction’s been challenged by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It says lists are likely to “at worst flatline”, whichever party forms the next government.

Meanwhile the Conservatives’ claim that under Labour working families face a £2,094 tax rise features in a number of the party’s Facebook adverts, often as a standalone figure. 

As we wrote last week, the £2,094 figure is unreliable and based on a number of questionable assumptions. It comes from a Conservative party estimate of Labour’s “unfunded spending commitments”, but many of the costings behind the calculation are uncertain. Even if the figure was right, we can’t be certain this money would be collected by raising taxes, and if it was, families are unlikely to be affected equally.

Finally, Jake Berry, the Conservative candidate for Rossendale and  Darwen, made a familiar claim about immigration in a Facebook ad which the ad library says ran from 4 to 11 June and received between 7,000 and 8,000 impressions. The advert said: “Labour don’t want to control immigration. Their plans could see us take in 100,000 extra illegal migrants, from Europe, every single year.”

We’ve written about similar claims from Conservative politicians several times before. The 100,000 figure was circulated by the Conservative party last September in response to comments made by Sir Keir Starmer about a potential future returns agreement with the EU. But the way it was calculated is incorrect. 

We don’t know how many more migrants might come to the UK as a result of any future returns deal negotiated under Labour. Labour has not detailed what such a deal would involve or said how many migrants it would be willing to accept.

We’ve contacted the Labour party and the Conservative party for comment, as well as all the candidates behind the adverts listed above, and will update this post if they respond. 

Image courtesy of Pixabay 

Update: Labour candidate Danny Beales contacted Full Fact after this blog was published, noting that his use of the 10 million waiting list figure was based on Labour “analysis that was published in a national press release”. He added that “data this week has shown a further increase in waiting times”. The latest NHS England data, for April 2024, showed a slight increase in cases awaiting treatment, compared to the previous month.

Following a busy week of manifesto launches, Full Fact analysis can reveal that none of the parties likely to play a role in the next government have put forward measures to meaningfully tackle misinformation in politics or to regulate political advertising.

This is not what the general public wants. 

Findings published today by Full Fact and Ipsos Mori can reveal that three-quarters (75%) of UK adults expect misinformation to have at least some impact on the General Election result.

The survey paints a picture of a highly distrusting electorate sceptical of the information circulating in our political conversation and also of politicians themselves—approximately half (54%) say they tend to ignore what parties and politicians say because they don’t know if they can be trusted. 

Alongside these findings, Full Fact’s petition to end deceptive campaign practices such as leaflets made to look like newspapers or fixed penalty notices—has gathered nearly 18,000 signatures, demonstrating considerable desire for parties to commit to running cleaner, more honest campaigns. 

The survey found that many UK adults are affected by misinformation in their everyday lives:

We have assessed all the manifestos of the parties most likely to enter government found that commitments to clean up politics do not match the scale of public support:

• The Conservative Party manifesto makes just one commitment to “improve standards in local councils by making their performance more transparent through the Office of Local Government." 
• The Labour Party manifesto commits to improving standards in public life through a "clean-up that ensures the highest standards of integrity and honesty", including the introduction of their long-standing call for an independent Ethics and Integrity Commission. But further detail on the scope and powers of this Commission—such as its role in handling misinformation and political advertising—is urgently needed. 
• The Liberal Democrat manifesto goes furthest, by including a number of promises to improve honesty and transparency, including to work “towards real-time transparency for political advertising”. It also commits the party to “pushing for a global convention or treaty to combat disinformation and electoral interference.”

None of the parties listed above have signed Full Fact’s pledge which would have committed them to ruling out using deceptive campaign practices during the election campaign. The Liberal Democrats, despite their manifesto commitments, have ruled out signing the pledge. 

The public deserves a parliament that puts accurate information and higher standards in public life at the forefront of their agenda. We will work with whoever forms the new government to continue to work for a more honest and transparent politics.

This evening ITV hosted its second debate of the 2024 general election campaign—this time involving representatives from seven of the UK’s political parties.

The line-up was the same as the seven-party debate hosted by the BBC last week: the Conservatives’ Penny Mordaunt; Labour’s Angela Rayner; the SNP’s Stephen Flynn; the Liberal Democrats’ Daisy Cooper; Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth; Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and the Green Party’s Carla Denyer.

We ‘live fact checked’ the debate, and you can now read a round-up of the claims we looked at.