In his conference speech yesterday, the Prime Minister claimed that Labour’s plan for migration “is to cook up some deal with the EU which could see us accepting around 100,000 of Europe's asylum seekers.” We have looked into this before and found that this figure is unreliable.
We’re asking Rishi Sunak not to repeat this claim. Can you help us?
Mr Sunak has used this figure before. It is a Conservative party estimate which is not reliable, because it makes several assumptions and appears to misinterpret a recent EU agreement on relocating asylum seekers. We wrote a fact check about it and wrote to him asking him not to repeat this claim. We did not receive a response, and he has repeated the claim.
Claims such as this have the potential to affect people’s opinions of individuals and parties, and how they choose to vote. Politicians should therefore ensure claims they make about their opponents are accurate and based on reliable information.
When he became Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak promised the public honesty and integrity. Will you ask him to stand by what he said when he came into power and stop repeating claims which are not supported by reliable evidence?
In his speech at the Conservative party conference on 2 October 2023, transport secretary Mark Harper MP claimed that local councils implementing ‘15 minute cities’ policies could decide when people go to the shops or ration road use.
We’ve seen no evidence that councils implementing the 15 minute cities concept are attempting to place restrictions on how often residents can go to the shops. Some councils are also proposing schemes which would restrict traffic on some roads, which have been the subject of controversy, though these aren’t always necessarily directly linked to the 15 minute cities concept.
In a speech on the second day of the Conservative party conference, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Claire Coutinho, claimed that Labour “seems so relaxed” about taxing meat.
We’ve found no evidence to support this claim and Ms Coutinho has not provided any. Taxing meat is not a Labour policy and the idea was rejected by a Shadow Cabinet member in 2021.
This week both the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the chancellor Jeremy Hunt claimed that inflation was a tax, and the chancellor claimed further that halving inflation would result in a ‘5p boost’ for people’s incomes.
Inflation is not a form of taxation—it’s a measure of how fast the prices of goods and services are rising or falling. The chancellor’s ‘5p boost’ claim is only correct if comparing people’s disposable income to what they would have had had the rate of inflation remained the same. If inflation is halved from 10% to 5%, then people will still spend 5p more for an item that cost £1 last year, not 5p less.
