Prime Minister’s Questions returned today, 9 October, following a busy party conference season, with Sir Keir Starmer and Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak going head-to-head across the despatch box.
As usual we fact checked proceedings live, and this week looked at claims on child poverty, the state of the public finances, the previous government’s hospital building programme and more.
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Have any of the promised “40 new hospitals” been built?
Mr Starmer claimed the previous government’s plans to build 40 new hospitals: “didn’t involve 40, didn’t involve hospitals and they weren’t new and they weren’t funded.”
We wrote about this in detail back in June, and Mr Starmer made similar claims at PMQs last month.
In their 2019 manifesto, the Conservatives pledged to build 40 new hospitals by 2030. Eight of the 40 projects announced in October 2020 were already “in build” or “pending final approval”, and the Department of Health and Social Care later said they “should not be referred to as part of the government’s 40 new hospitals manifesto commitment”.
However, eight further schemes mentioned in the government’s original October announcement replaced the eight pre-existing schemes as far as the target of 40 was concerned.
Exactly what counts as a new hospital may be a matter of opinion, but the previous government set out a broad definition, which could include “a major new clinical building or a new wing, providing a whole clinical service, at an existing hospital”.
Taking this into consideration, as far as we can tell one project—the Dyson Cancer Centre in Bath—has been opened and counts towards the total.
£22 billion ‘black hole’
Mr Starmer twice referenced a “£22 billion black hole” in the UK’s economy. We first heard this claim in July, when the chancellor Rachel Reeves claimed the UK’s public finances were worse than expected. The source of the figure was a Treasury Public Spending Audit which found a “forecast overspend on departmental spending” in the current year, above the totals set during the Spring Budget.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said then that many of the challenges Labour outlined were “entirely predictable”, but that the financial pressures “do genuinely appear to be greater than could be discerned from the outside”.
“Stalling” economic growth
Mr Sunak said that on the Prime Minister’s watch “growth is now stalling”. Data covering UK GDP growth for the entire three month period since Labour was elected in early July has not yet been published, but the latest monthly GDP data does show that in July the UK economy saw zero growth.
However, it’s worth noting that the UK also saw zero growth in the previous month, while the Conservatives were still in office.
These figures are accurate at the time of writing, but GDP figures are subject to revision, so could change.
Child poverty
Mr Starmer also claimed “child poverty went up by 700,000 since 2010”.
This claim also featured in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto. As we wrote in June, the figure is correct when looking at one measure of child poverty, relative poverty after housing costs. But there are several different ways of measuring child poverty.
The number of children in absolute poverty after housing costs didn’t change significantly between 2010/11 and 2022/23. The number of children living in relative and absolute poverty before housing costs increased over this period, by 900,000 and 300,000 respectively.