Decision to stop Rwanda flight nothing to do with EU

17 Jun 2022 | Full Fact's weekly news

FACT CHECK
Decision to stop Rwanda flight nothing to do with EU

On Tuesday, the first flight due to take asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda was cancelled, due to an intervention from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

GB News and ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme said the flight was stopped by an “EU court injunction” or “EU court ruling” in on-screen text, implying that the ECHR is linked to the European Union. This is incorrect. The ECHR is not an EU institution.

The ECHR is part of the Council of Europe, a human rights organisation of which the UK is still a member, alongside 45 other states.

ITV acknowledged their caption was incorrect but said they had explained during the segment the difference between the ECHR and the EU. We also contacted GB News but they didn’t reply.

ECHR and the EU

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FACT CHECK
Labour and Conservatives make misleading claims about affordable housing

🔵 “We built more affordable homes in one year of the incoming Conservative government after 2010—or Coalition government—than the Labour party did in 13 years in office.” - Boris Johnson

This is incorrect. Government data shows that 557,000 new affordable homes were completed in England during the whole of the last Labour government. The most completed by any Conservative or coalition government in any one year since was 66,000.

We can’t find any way of altering or re-interpreting the official government definition of ‘affordable homes’ in order to make this claim correct.

🔴 “95% fall in new affordable homes available to buy under the Conservatives.” - The Labour Party on social media

This is also wrong. Labour calculated this supposed 95% fall by taking the total number of new affordable homes made available to buy in England in 2009/2010 and comparing it to the same number in 2020/2021 —the most recent year available.

But the government changed how it records the number of new homes available under affordable home ownership in 2015. The category was split in two, to differentiate between shared ownership and outright ownership.

Adding these figures back together for 2021/22 comes to 18,238. That’s a fall of 18%, not 95% as Labour claimed.

We’ve written to both the Prime Minister and the Labour press office asking for corrections.

Conservatives wrong on housing

Labour wrong on housing

FACT CHECK
No evidence one refugee from Rwanda will come to the UK for every asylum seeker sent there

Readers of this newsletter alerted us to a video on YouTube, which claimed that the UK will accept as many refugees from Rwanda as asylum seekers that it sends there.

The man in the video claims that if we “if we land 50 refugees of our own in Rwanda, then the plane will fly back to this country with 50 of the most vulnerable refugees from the Congo and Burundi.” He therefore claims that the UK will not reduce the number of refugees and asylum seekers it has overall as a result of the policy.

The Home Office told us that this is “absolutely not the case”. While the agreement between the UK and Rwanda does say that the countries will make arrangements “to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most vulnerable refugees in the United Kingdom”, it does not say that the number will be the same as the number of asylum seekers sent by the UK to Rwanda.

We do not yet know how many refugees the UK will resettle from Rwanda. However, Baroness Williams told Parliament that it would amount to “a small number.”

What the agreement actually says

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