Politics Live

Health secretary Wes Streeting claimed three times in parliament this week that previous Labour governments have overseen the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in the health service’s history.

As we’ve reported before, there’s not comparable data going back long enough to be sure that either of these claims are true.

Addressing the House of Commons on 9 September, Mr Streeting said he could “call on any number of Labour health secretaries who helped deliver the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in history”. He repeated that comment twice more. These comments were then also reported on by PA and detected by Full Fact’s AI tools.

We’ve fact checked these claims from prominent Labour politicians a number of times before.

As we said previously, it’s not clear what a claim about the ‘shortest waiting times in history’ would be based on. Waiting times don’t appear to have been recorded nationally until 1987, and have been measured in different ways since. If Mr Streeting meant to refer to the size of the waiting list then these have also been measured in several different ways since the NHS was founded, and experts at the Nuffield Trust have told us that they’re not aware of any data that would allow a direct comparison of this sort.

Likewise, we’ve been unable to find a consistent measure of patient satisfaction across the NHS’s history.

Public satisfaction with the NHS began to be measured consistently in 1983, and reached its highest point in 2010, just after the end of the last Labour government. (Although it’s unlikely the Conservative-led coalition that followed had significantly influenced the NHS by then.)

We’ve contacted Mr Streeting’s office and will update this blog with any response.

BBC News and the Independent have been the latest media outlets to confuse the number of people and the number of cases awaiting treatment on the NHS. Both have now corrected their articles, after Full Fact got in touch.

Both said there were 7.6 million people on NHS waiting lists, whereas in fact there are about 6.4 million people in the latest data, waiting for non-emergency care in England. These people are awaiting treatment in 7.6 million cases (because some people are waiting for more than one thing).

We’ve fact checked similar claims a number of times over the last year.

It’s important to remember that the data on non-emergency treatment doesn’t cover everyone who is waiting for anything on the NHS in England.

Survey data published by the Office for National Statistics in April 2024 suggests that in January and February 2024, around 21% of adults in England—or about 9.7 million in total—were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast this morning, crime and policing minister Dame Diana Johnson MP said: “clearly knife crime over the last decade has increased.”

While this is true when looking at overall knife-related offences in England and Wales, some of the increase is due to changes in the way police record such crimes. In addition, some forms of knife crime are currently at a lower level than they were prior to the pandemic. 

In December 2020 a new methodology for counting the number of offences involving knives or sharp instruments was implemented. As a result, the following year the Office for National Statistics noted that the changes and improvements had “made substantial contributions to rises in recorded crime, including offences involving knives or sharp instruments”.

It added: “Increases in these offences since 2015 will be partly because of a genuine increase in these offences and partly because of improvements in recording.”

While knife-enabled crime recorded by police rose by 4% between March 2023 and March 2024, the figure is 3% lower than the equivalent for the year ending March 2020, prior to the pandemic. 

Following years of substantial increases, offences involving “possession of an article with a blade or point” in England and Wales fell by 3% in the year ending March 2024. Although hospital admissions for assault involving a sharp object increased, they are 18% below pre-pandemic levels. 

These figures exclude data from Greater Manchester Police.

We’ve contacted Dame Diana and the Home Office for comment.

A claim that Labour’s energy plans could save households up to £300 on their bills has re-emerged, after reports that the figure had been dropped by the government.

In an article last week the Times reported: “A government source said Labour stood by a commitment made in its election campaign, although not detailed in its manifesto, that the party’s plans would bring household energy bills down by an average of up to £300 a year, which was based on independent data modelling.”

We fact checked this figure before the election. It’s based on a report by the energy think tank Ember, which estimated that under a scenario in which the UK met its renewable energy commitments, the average household electricity bill would be around £300 lower in 2030 than in 2023.

However, the £300 figure is based on the level of the energy price cap in July-September 2023. The price cap has since decreased (though it will increase in October from its current level).

What’s more, the £300 figure is not actually a direct assessment of the impact of Labour’s plans, but an estimate of the impact of a different, less ambitious scenario than Labour is proposing.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero confirmed to Full Fact that it stands by the figure, and said that while it couldn’t deliver change “overnight”, achieving its energy goals by 2030 would “protect billpayers permanently”.

In a speech in the Downing Street garden today, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said there’s a “£22 billion black hole in the public finances”. 

We’d already heard Labour party chair Ellie Reeves mention the same figure during interviews this morning.

Mr Starmer and Ms Reeves are referring to an announcement made by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, last month. At the time, she said an audit by the Treasury had discovered a £22 billion forecast overspend this year. 

We looked into this last month. 

Ahead of the election, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had said that a new government would likely see a shortfall of £10-£20 billion by 2028/29. After the chancellor’s statement, IFS Director Paul Johnson said many of the challenges Labour outlined in July were “entirely predictable”, but that the in-year financial pressures did “genuinely appear to be greater than could be discerned from the outside”. 

Following the chancellor’s statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility said it had launched a review into the preparation of the Departmental Expenditure Limits forecast for the March 2024 Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the report they produced for the then Conservative government’s Spring Budget. The review would look at the “adequacy of the information” provided by the Treasury at the time. 

The Labour party chair and minister without portfolio, Ellie Reeves, said on Sky News this morning: “We’ve come into government. We’ve fixed the disputes with the junior doctors, so that people can get the appointments that they need.”

It’s true that the government has made an offer considered acceptable by the BMA, the union that represents the doctors. 

However, it’s probably going a bit far to say this means they’ve “fixed” the dispute, since the doctors themselves are still voting on whether to accept the offer. The referendum to decide this doesn’t close until 15 September.

We’ve asked Ms Reeves for comment and will update this blog with any response.

In January, we fact checked former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he made a similar claim, saying the previous government had “reached resolution” with other doctors, when at the time both consultants and specialty/specialist doctors had not yet confirmed that their strikes were over.

The Secretary of State for Wales, Jo Stevens, claimed earlier today that the last Labour government saw the highest patient satisfaction and the shortest waiting lists in the NHS’s history. In fact we don’t have comparable data going back long enough, so we can’t be sure that either of these claims is true.

Speaking on Times Radio on 20 August, Ms Stevens said: “The last time that we had two Labour governments in the United Kingdom, one in Wales and one in Westminster, we had the highest patient satisfaction in NHS history and the shortest waiting list times as well.”

We’ve fact checked these claims a number of times before, such as when Keir Starmer said it last year, and then again during his election campaign.

As we said then, we’ve not been able to find a consistent measure of patient satisfaction over the history of the NHS. The Picker Institute, who conduct research on people’s experience of care, confirmed that they are also not aware of comparable data covering both the last Labour government and the Conservative-led government that followed.

Public satisfaction with the NHS began to be measured consistently in 1983, and reached its highest point in 2010, just after the end of the last Labour government. (Although it’s unlikely the Conservative-led coalition that followed had significantly influenced the NHS by then.)

Likewise, we can’t say whether Labour delivered the shortest NHS waiting lists because waiting lists have been measured in several different ways since the NHS was founded.

Experts at the Nuffield Trust told us that they were not aware of any data that would allow a direct comparison of waiting lists throughout the history of the NHS.

We’ve contacted Ms Stevens and will update this blog with any response.

This week saw A-level results released across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and politicians from both sides of the House have repeated claims that we’ve looked at before. 

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Labour’s education secretary Bridget Phillipson stated: “We’ve seen big rises under the last government where it comes to child poverty.”

As we’ve explained in previous fact checks, there are different ways of measuring child poverty. While some measures show an increase since 2010, at least one measure—the number of children in absolute low income after housing costs—fell during the period of Conservative-led or Conservative government, from 3.7 million in 2009/10 to 3.6 million in 2022/23. 

Meanwhile, Full Fact’s AI tools alerted us to another claim we’d looked into previously. Conservative shadow minister Greg Smith wrote in the Daily Express: “Since 2010, the percentage of state-funded schools in England rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted has surged from 68% to 90%.”

This is similar to a claim made earlier this year by then schools minister Damian Hinds. When we looked at that we found that, although it is accurate for England, the way schools are inspected has changed, making direct comparisons between these time periods difficult.

We’ve been asked to have a look at comments made by the Conservative MP and former minister David Davis MP on a recent episode of Leading, an interview strand of The Rest is Politics podcast, hosted by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. 

In the podcast, Mr Davis and Mr Stewart discussed trade barriers with China. Mr Davis said graphics chips in computers come from Taiwan, which was then followed by this exchange: 

RS: “Nobody’s putting tariff barriers against Taiwan, they’re putting tariff barriers against China”.

DD: “But that’s where it comes from… Most of our trade is with Taiwan, that’s the first thing to know about this”. 

It’s not entirely clear what comparison Mr Davis was making. We’ve contacted him and will update this blog if we receive a reply. 

But official statistics show that the total value of the UK’s trade with China is greater than its trade with Taiwan. 

In the four quarters to the end of Quarter 1 2024, the value of total trade between the UK and Taiwan was £7.2 billion. In the same period, the UK’s trade with China was worth £86.5 billion. Taiwan was the UK’s 35th largest trading partner, and China the 6th largest.

While the UK doesn’t recognise Taiwan as a state, since 1991 the UK and Taiwan have held annual ministerial trade talks. 

Update: We are grateful to Mr Davis for clarifying that he intended to refer solely to supply of very advanced technology, specifically logic chips (<10 nanometres), the majority of which are made in Taiwan, rather than to the UK’s overall trade, or its trade in tech products generally, with Taiwan and China.