Politics Live

The Home Office has today published data to support a claim made by the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer about immigration returns since Labour entered government, after Full Fact asked that it urgently do so.

Mr Starmer claimed that there had been a “23% increase” in returns of people without a right to be in the UK since Labour was elected, compared to the previous summer. As we wrote at the time, this claim was based on immigration returns data which had not yet been published.

Office for Statistics Regulation guidance states: “Where unpublished data are referred to unexpectedly, the information should be published as soon as possible after any statement has been made – ideally on the same day.”

We wrote to the Home Office on 27 September to ask that it publish this data without any further delay, explaining that, without this, neither we nor the public can verify the claims being made about the government’s record. We did not receive a response, and wrote about this issue again yesterday when similar figures were used by a Home Office spokesperson.

Earlier this week we asked the Home Office for a reply to our letter, which also asked the department to investigate how and why the Code of Practice for Statistics was not followed. On the day after the general election, we asked the Prime Minister to incorporate compulsory adherence to the Code of Practice for Statistics within the Ministerial Code, to help restore trust in politics.

The data published by the Home Office today shows that Mr Starmer was referring specifically to enforced returns between 5 July and 31 August, which were 23% higher than over the same period in 2023.

We wrote more about how immigration returns are categorised earlier this year (though some of the figures mentioned in that article may now be out of date).

In a comment published in the Daily Telegraph today a Home Office spokesperson said: “We have already begun delivering a major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity to remove people with no right to be in the UK, with 3,000 people already being returned since the new government came into power.”

An anonymous Home Office source is also quoted in the online version of the article as saying: “Under our plans, over 20 per cent more people who have no right to be here are being removed from the country.”

We’ve contacted the Home Office to ask for the source of these figures, but they would appear to be based on as yet unpublished immigration returns data for the third quarter of 2024. The latest published data covers the period up to June 2024, before the current government came into office. 

This comes after we wrote to the Home Office last month about Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s use of unpublished immigration statistics in his Labour party conference speech. We’ve still not had a response to that letter.

As we said then, Office for Statistics Regulation guidance states: “Where unpublished data are referred to unexpectedly, the information should be published as soon as possible after any statement has been made – ideally on the same day.” 

This is important because, without this, neither we nor the public can verify the claims being made about the government’s record.

It’s been more than a week since the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, claimed in his conference speech that there’s been a “23% increase” in immigration returns compared with last summer, and as of today, 4 October, the government has still not published the data behind his claim.

As we explained at the time, Office for Statistics Regulation guidance states: “Where unpublished data are referred to unexpectedly, the information should be published as soon as possible after any statement has been made – ideally on the same day.” Without this, neither we nor the public can verify Mr Starmer’s statement.

We’ve written to the Home Office to ask that they publish this data without any further delay.

The Democratic and Republican vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance went head-to-head last night in their only planned televised debate of the 2024 US election.

Mr Vance, who is a senator for Ohio and Mr Trump’s running mate, and Mr Walz, who is the current governor of Minnesota and standing alongside Kamala Harris, clashed on a range of issues including the economy, abortion, immigration and healthcare. 

We have not fact checked the debate directly—our politics team’s focus today is fact checking the speeches of the leadership hopefuls at the Conservative conference in Birmingham. 

But Full Fact’s AI tools have been supporting two International Fact-Checking Network-verified fact checking organisations in the US to analyse key claims made during the debate in even more detail.

They and a number of our other fact checking colleagues in America have ruled on what both candidates got right and wrong during the debate, which was hosted by the TV network CBS in New York.

Claims that came under scrutiny include Mr Walz talking about a a “registry of pregnancies” (see Politifact, FactCheck.org), a claim by Mr Vance about Iran receiving “unfrozen assets” (CBS, CNN) and a claim from Mr Vance about the number of “illegal aliens” who are in the US (CNN, BBC Verify).

Mr Walz also said during the debate that he “misspoke” when he previously said he’d been in Hong Kong in the spring of 1989 when protests turned into a massacre in China’s Tiananmen Square.

For more on the US election, see how we covered last month’s debate between the presidential candidates and a summary of some of the online misinformation we’ve seen.

Both images courtesy of Gage Skidmore

During a Q&A at his party’s conference earlier today, Conservative leadership candidate James Cleverly MP highlighted a specific statistic from the seven months he was “personally” responsible for dealing with migration as home secretary.

He said: “In that seven months I reduced net migration by… 300,000 people per year.”  

Earlier this year we fact checked a similar claim from Robert Jenrick MP—a former immigration minister, and now one of Mr Cleverly’s rivals for the Conservative leadership.

The 300,000 figure appears to refer to the previous government’s estimate of the expected impact of a series of immigration measures which were announced in December 2023 and came into effect at different points in early 2024. It estimated that had these measures been in place, together with restrictions on international students bringing dependants (announced prior to Mr Cleverly becoming home secretary), around 300,000 people who came to the UK in the year to September 2023 would not have been able to come.

But figures for net migration since these measures were introduced are yet to be published, so we don’t yet know the extent of their actual impact. The most recent data from the Office for National Statistics only goes up to December 2023.

While we can’t say exactly how net migration has changed since these measures were introduced, Home Office statistics do show that visa applications for many of the visa categories impacted by the changes decreased in the year to June 2024 compared with the previous year.

We’ve contacted Mr Cleverly for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.

A controversial claim from Conservative leadership candidate and former Cabinet minister Robert Jenrick MP about the UK’s special forces and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has been a key talking point at the Conservative party conference today.

In a campaign video released yesterday, Mr Jenrick said that “our special forces are killing rather than capturing terrorists because our lawyers tell us that if they’re caught the European Court will set them free”. 

It’s difficult for us to fact check many claims about national security because information is often classified, and Mr Jenrick hasn’t referenced any specific examples. We’ve asked Mr Jenrick for more information and will update this post if we receive a response. 

But asked about his claim on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Mr Jenrick pointed to an interview with former defence secretary Ben Wallace that was published in the Telegraph last year.

Mr Jenrick told the BBC: “The point I was making was one that our former defence secretary Ben Wallace has made, which is that our human rights apparatus including the ECHR is encroaching on the battlefield.” 

Mr Jenrick continued: “Of course I’m not going to elaborate on particular cases because these things … these cases are not things that any minister or former minister can speak about.”

In his 2023 Telegraph interview, Mr Wallace said: “When we have a threat to the UK, this lunacy of being unable to render people across borders or arrest people in countries whose police forces are unacceptable, means that we are more often than not forced into taking lethal action than actually raiding and detaining.”

He added: “Getting permission from the host government is one thing. Getting an ECHR detention pathway is another thing. Somalia may say you can blow up al-Shabab because they’re our enemy as well, but if we go in and they surrender, we get told their detention pathway isn’t compliant. It’s a ridiculous catch-22 position, which doesn’t reflect the threat.

“There are a number of individuals who pose an imminent threat to the UK, who I would prefer to have captured, rather than deal with by a strike.”

Other Conservative leadership candidates including Tom Tugendhat MP and James Cleverly MP have criticised Mr Jenrick’s comments today and said he should justify the claims.

The deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence think tank, Malcolm Chalmers, told Times Radio: “It’s a very dangerous comment to make, unless he has concrete evidence that this is taking place … That’s the sort of allegation which, if not proven, could put our forces at risk.”

On Sunday former Prime Minister and outgoing Conservative party leader Rishi Sunak MP gave a short speech at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham. It featured a number of claims we’ve previously fact checked which would benefit from some additional context.

Mr Sunak claimed that his government left Labour “the fastest growing economy in the G7”. Similar claims from various Conservative politicians which we’ve written about previously appear to be based on the UK’s growth across the first half of 2024, which the Resolution Foundation has previously said was the highest in the G7. 

However the figures over a longer time period show a different picture. For example, in 2023, the UK saw the second lowest annual growth in the G7, ahead of Germany, and has also seen the second slowest growth since before the pandemic, also ahead of Germany.

(It’s also worth noting that earlier today, after Mr Sunak’s speech, the UK’s second quarter growth was revised down from 0.6% to 0.5%.)

Mr Sunak also claimed that the Conservatives in the last year delivered “a £900 tax cut for those in work”.

As we’ve explained a number of times, it’s true an average full-time worker (earning around £35,000) will save around £900 this financial year as a result of a combined four percentage point reduction in National Insurance contributions (NICs) implemented by the Conservative government. But not all workers will save that much, and once the impact of other tax changes is factored in, including ongoing freezes to the personal allowance and NICs threshold, the average worker’s overall tax savings are set to be lower.

Elsewhere in his speech the Leader of the Opposition claimed that “our children are now the best readers in the western world”. 

As we wrote during the election, this claim appears to be based on the results of the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which relates to primary school pupils in England. 

However it’s worth noting that according to a different measure, Programme for International Student (PISA) test results, 15-year-old pupils in Ireland, Canada and the US had a higher average reading score than those in England in 2022. 

Finally, the former PM claimed his party had “halved crime”. This is another familiar claim. It’s based on specific data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) which doesn't count fraud or computer misuse offences, so doesn't represent all crime.  

We’ll be monitoring other key speeches, including those of the four leadership candidates, throughout the Conservative party conference this week.

Within two hours of receiving requests from us, both the Mirror and MailOnline corrected recent errors that they had published about NHS waiting lists. Yesterday, The Guardian corrected an article, and earlier this month The Observer also corrected an editorial containing similar errors.

The latest data for June 2024 shows there were 7.6 million cases on the NHS waiting list in England and around 6.4 million cases (as some people will be waiting for more than one thing). 

All of these mistakes were picked up by Full Fact’s AI tools. These tools are continuing to detect misreporting of NHS waiting list data, typically when figures for people and cases are confused.We’re grateful to all newspapers that promptly correct significant inaccuracies.

This afternoon Sir Keir Starmer delivered his first Labour party conference speech as Prime Minister—and we fact checked it live, with a team of seven fact checkers and our AI tools looking at the claims he made in real time.

We didn’t find lots to check, certainly compared with some of Mr Starmer’s appearances during the election campaign, but he covered a number of topics we’ve looked at before. 

To begin, Mr Starmer claimed that a “ban” on onshore wind had been “lifted”. We’ve seen this claim a number of times previously, including as recently as Sunday when the deputy PM Angela Rayner used similar language in her own conference speech. 

Planning rules introduced in 2015, which Labour has now reversed, were often described as a “de-facto ban” because they resulted in a substantial decrease in applications for onshore wind sites. But there was no formal ban as such on onshore wind farms, and a limited number of onshore wind turbines have been built in recent years.

Elsewhere in his speech, the Prime Minister referenced a “financial black hole” and “£22 billion of unfunded spending commitments” inherited from the previous government.

We first looked at claims about this figure back in July—it’s taken from a Public Spending Review published by the Treasury which found that “forecast overspend on departmental spending is expected to be £21.9 billion” above the totals set out in the previous government’s Spring Budget.

Our post from yesterday has a quick summary of what this means and what the response to the claims has been.

Mr Starmer went on to outline his party’s commitment to cutting NHS waiting lists. We’ve written extensively about this topic and our explainer looks at how many are waiting, how long for and more.

And the Prime Minister also spoke about Labour’s plans to get “control of migration”. Another of our explainers looks at how migration levels have changed in recent years, and what might happen going forward.

Finally, we’re still looking into Mr Starmer’s claim that there has been a “23% increase in returns of people who have no right to be here compared with last summer”. We’ve asked the Home Office about this stat and will share an update if we hear back.

At the Labour party conference this week we’ve heard a number of senior politicians repeat a familiar claim about the state of the economy inherited from the previous government.

In fact, in her speech this afternoon Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves twice mentioned a “£22 billion black hole” in the public finances and also referenced “£22 billion of spending plans, this year, that the previous government did not disclose”, while Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner mentioned the same figure in her own speech on Sunday.

We looked into this figure when it was first used by Ms Reeves back in July.

It’s taken from a Public Spending Review published by the Treasury which found that “forecast overspend on departmental spending is expected to be £21.9 billion” above the totals set out in the previous government’s Spring Budget.

The figure includes several “unfunded policy decisions” made by the previous government as well as £11-12 billion in higher-than-expected public sector spending on pay, even before newly announced pay rises are taken into account.

The extent to which the economic landscape inherited by Labour was unexpected is disputed, however.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had warned ahead of the election that a new government would likely see a shortfall of £10-£20 billion by 2028/29 which would likely result in cuts to unprotected government budgets. And following Ms Reeves’ announcement in July IFS director Paul Johnson said many of the challenges outlined were “entirely predictable”.

However, he also said that “the extent of the in-year funding pressures does genuinely appear to be greater than could be discerned from the outside”.

Earlier this month, it was reported that cabinet secretary Sir Simon Case wrote in a letter to shadow chancellor Jeremy Hunt MP that the lack of a Spending Review since 2021 has contributed to uncertainty over public finances.

However Mr Hunt said the letter raised “more serious questions” for the government, and suggested that the £22 billion figure may be “a political device to justify tax rises”.

In her speech to conference this afternoon, Ms Reeves also said that she took the decision to means test the Winter Fuel Payment “faced with that £22 billion black hole” and the fact that “the state pension will rise by an estimated £1,700 over the course of this Parliament”.

As we explained earlier this month, the £1,700 figure is correct for the full new state pension based on the expected increase of 4% next year, and Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts for the triple lock from 2026/27 to 2029/30. It would represent an average annual increase of just under £350.