Politics Live

Over the course of the election campaign we’ve heard Labour repeatedly claim that under the Conservatives the so-called ‘tax burden’ has reached the highest level in 70 years, while the Conservatives have claimed to be cutting people’s taxes.

We’ve just published a new explainer which takes a detailed look at what’s happened to the tax burden in recent years, how it could be affected by Labour and Conservative proposals, and why a high tax burden doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is paying more tax.

Both the Conservatives and Labour are misleading voters about the impact of each other’s policies in this election.

It is misleading to say without proper context and caveats, as the Conservatives often have, that a Labour government would mean “£2,000 in higher taxes for every working family”. This figure is unreliable and based on questionable assumptions, not an independent forecast worth taking seriously. 

Likewise, Labour is misleading people when it tells them—again and again, also without due caveats—that Conservative plans “will mean £4,800 more on your mortgage”. This figure is speculative and based on uncertain assumptions, so again talking like it’s reliable or definite misleads people.

No one knows exactly what will happen in the future. Taxes could indeed go up under Labour, or mortgages under the Conservatives. But as we and other fact checkers have shown, these figures are partisan attacks on a political enemy, not credible attempts to put a price on voters’ choices. 

It’s not only Full Fact and our supporters who think this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. The party leaders have said themselves that they need to earn people’s trust.

On becoming Prime Minister in 2022, Rishi Sunak said: “This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level. Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.”

In a speech at the start of this year, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “We have to bring the country together, have to earn trust as well as votes… And yet, trust in politics is now so low, so degraded, that nobody believes you can make a difference anymore.” The Labour party manifesto promises “the highest standards of integrity and honesty”.

We’ve not seen enough of this from either party so far. (We could make similar points about other parties, but we've chosen in this piece to focus on specific claims made by the two largest parties in the UK.)

Politicians should be truthful with voters because it is the right thing to do. 

But if they need more convincing, there is evidence that the people whose votes they are fighting for are also among the most likely to distrust them. 

A new Savanta poll commissioned by Full Fact shows that 78% of people who are unsure how to vote said they were not confident that the parties have run honest campaigns. 

This is an opportunity for politicians who are prepared to behave differently.

Mr Sunak and Mr Starmer are both quite right to say that trust must be earned—but just saying so isn’t good enough. They must prove they mean it in the final fortnight of the campaign.

Following an intervention from Full Fact, the Green Party has corrected a claim in its manifesto about the number of people on NHS waiting lists. 

The ‘long version’ of the manifesto, published on the party’s website on 12 June, the day it was launched, stated: “The long-term under funding of the NHS has left nearly 8 million of us on hospital waiting lists.” 

But as we wrote last week, this is not what NHS England data shows. 

The latest referral to treatment (RTT) data when the manifesto was published showed that in March 2024 about 6.3 million people were waiting to begin about 7.5 million courses of treatment. (New data published since then shows that in April 2024 6.3 million people were waiting for about 7.6 million courses of treatment.) 

There are always more cases than people in the data, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing.

We wrote to the Green Party about this, and following our intervention, a corrected version of the manifesto has been published on the party’s ‘manifesto downloads’ page, which reads: “The long-term under funding of the NHS has left 6.3 million of us on hospital waiting lists.”

According to internet archive the WayBack Machine, the corrected manifesto was posted at some point on 13 June. (It’s worth noting that the uncorrected version of the manifesto, though removed from the manifesto downloads page, still remains online and may be linked to from elsewhere.)

We are grateful to the Green Party for having made the correction.

The Green Party was one of four signatories to Full Fact’s leaders’ pledge, which asked politicians to commit to being honest and transparent in the general election. This also included a commitment to our manifesto standards which require parties to correct errors in their manifestos when they have been notified of such. Plaid Cymru, the Alliance Party and the SDLP were also signatories to the pledge.

Full Fact’s chief executive Chris Morris said: “Full Fact wants to increase trust in politics, not diminish it—but it's up to our politicians to lead by example and earn that trust. This correction from the Green Party is the sort of behaviour that we hope to see from all parties when they are notified of an inaccuracy.”

We continue to call on all parties, and whoever forms the next government, to show bold leadership by committing to honesty and accuracy in all party communications. 

This evening the leaders of four political parties will be questioned by members of the public in a two-hour Question Time Leaders’ Special. 

The show will be hosted by Fiona Bruce and broadcast on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 8pm.  

Each leader will face 30 minutes of questions from members of a live studio audience in York. The running order will be the Liberal Democrats’ Sir Ed Davey, the SNP’s John Swinney, Labour’s Keir Starmer and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for the Conservatives. 

Full Fact’s fact checkers will be following the programme live, and scrutinising in real time the claims made by the politicians, highlighting statements that we think are wrong, misleading or need more context. 

You can follow our work on X (formerly Twitter) or here on Election Live throughout the show.

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.