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Thank you for standing with us in 2021
Whether it was reading our work, donating, or sending in posts and images that just didn't look right–your support this year has taken us closer to the honest and accountable debate we all deserve.
Thanks to you and thousands of others, hundreds of false claims were fact checked, resulting in corrections in the BBC, the Economist, the Sun, the Guardian, Hansard and many other places.
Every small bit of support helped give tens of millions of people a better choice than bad information. Thank you!
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FACT CHECK
Resettlement figures don’t give us the full picture on refugee numbers
A clip of health secretary Sajid Javid telling Sky News that the UK has resettled more refugees than any other country in Europe since 2015 has been watched on social media over a million times.
But while this is technically correct, “resettlement” only applies to a small percentage of the number of refugees a country might accept. The Home Office told us that since 2015, the UK has resettled 25,000 refugees. It’s true that this is more than any other country in Europe.
But other countries in Europe have accepted far more people for protection as a whole than the UK.
“Resettled” only refers to refugees who have been resettled in a specific country through an official resettlement scheme. The majority of people granted protection after entering the EU and the UK are asylum seekers, which means they have not been pre-approved for resettlement through an official scheme but applied for asylum once they reached their destination.
The UK issued 19,049 “first instance” decisions on asylum cases in 2020, granting a positive outcome to 9,072 of these.
This is far fewer than a number of other European countries, such as Germany’s 98,000 people, Spain’s 51,200, Greece’s 35,800. Though these figures aren’t perfectly comparable.
A better way to compare the number of asylum decisions between European countries over the course of five years is to look at the number of positive first-instance decisions on asylum applications from 2015 to 2019 (before Brexit).
Germany accepted by far the highest number of asylum applications in the first instance in the EU, with 982,695 positive decisions between 2015 and 2019. That’s seventeen times more than the 57,560 the UK made over the same period of time.
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EXPLAINER
Our refugees explainer
Following the tragic deaths of 27 people in the English Channel, there has been renewed debate on the topic of migrants, asylum seekers and the facts around asylum applications.
We take a look at the common claims, misconceptions and facts.
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FACT CHECK
Misleading for Nadine Dorries to say Channel 4 is ‘in receipt of taxpayers’ money’
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries told a select committee hearing at the House of Commons that Channel 4 was “in receipt of public money,” later claiming specifically “taxpayers’ money.”
This is misleading—and potentially not true depending on your understanding of what it means to be “in receipt” of such money.
Channel 4 is a publicly owned ‘public corporation’, which entirely funds itself through commercial activities, mainly advertising. Indeed, the most recent year’s figures show that the channel generated a pre-tax surplus.
On Twitter, Ms Dorries said: “C4 borrowings sit on the Gov balance sheet.” It’s true that Channel 4’s borrowing counts as government borrowing. However, we can find no evidence of the government ever having to cover the channel’s debts.
The Treasury itself classifies Channel 4 as a “self financing public corporation.” Channel 4 also pays tax to the government, so it may even be a net contributor to the public purse.
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MORE FACT CHECKS
Also this week...
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Stop the spread of bad information
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All the best,
Team Full Fact
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