At last night’s televised leadership Q&A, we worked with Sky News to fact check in real-time for their Politics Hub live blog. Here are some of our findings:
🔵 Liz Truss
Challenged on her now-scrapped policy to save up to £8.8 billion from the public sector wage bill through regional pay boards, Liz Truss said: “What I am clear about is that policy was not about teachers and doctors.”
However as we found earlier this week, and as was subsequently pointed out in the Q&A, Liz Truss’s own press release said that the £8.8 billion figure referred to “the potential savings if the system were to be adopted for all public sector workers in the long term”.
Ms Truss went on to claim that she’d “always been clear that the travel advice is that British people should not go to Ukraine”.
But this isn’t true. In February, she was asked by the BBC whether or not she would support individuals travelling from Britain to Ukraine to fight. In response, she said: "I do support that, and of course that is something that people can make their own decisions about.”
At no point in the interview did she mention her department’s official advice not to travel, and that her own opinion differed from official advice.
🔵 Rishi Sunak
Rishi Sunak claimed that Liz Truss’s plan to scrap the “NHS levy” is one that “benefits the top 15% of earners”. But while the top 15% of earners would benefit from the change, so too would many earning less.
The Health and Social Care Levy, which this year takes the form of a 1.25 percentage point rise in National Insurance which came into effect in April, is paid by workers and employers.
As an employee, you pay National insurance on earnings above £1,048 a month, or around £12,500 a year, so it's clear reversing the rise in National Insurance would not only affect the top 15% of earners.
Mr Sunak may be echoing comments made by former health secretary Sajid Javid to Sky News back in April, when he said the top 15% of earners will pay almost 50% of the increased tax take. But if so, that’s not the same as saying only those 15% of earners would benefit from the policy being reversed.
Mr Sunak also claimed that he oversaw the largest growth in the defence budget since the Cold War.
In real terms the budget rose £2.7bn last year but, as part of a multi-year funding settlement he oversaw, by 2023/24 is expected to be only £1.5bn higher than when he became Chancellor. By comparison it rose £1.6bn the year before he became Chancellor.
“What I’m very concerned about on the TV licence fee is how many women have ended up in prison for non-payment, a disproportionate number.” - Liz Truss in the Daily Mail
There are a number of problems with this claim. You cannot be sent to prison for failing to pay a TV licence fee, only for failing to pay the fine for not having one. Being imprisoned for this is rare—the latest figures show no one was jailed for it in 2020 or 2021.
Far more women than men are prosecuted for TV licence evasion.
But the claim that a disproportionate number of women are imprisoned following conviction isn’t supported by the evidence.
Between 1995 and 2018, a total of 1,449 men were jailed for the offence compared to 754 women, suggesting that in fact men may be disproportionately more likely to be jailed.
However this ratio does vary depending on the time period looked at. Over the last ten years, for instance, a slightly higher proportion of those jailed are women (53%), while over the last five years that figure is 46%.
The widely-repeated claim that a Cornish company was awarded a £70 billion contract by the government to help public sector bodies meet net zero goals is not correct.
Confusion arose when the government’s Contracts Finder website, which allows you to search for public sector contracts, published an entry which appeared to show that a contract with a value of £70,000,000,000 had been awarded to a supplier called Place Group Ltd. According to Companies House, this company had around two employees as recently as 2020.
So what’s really happened? The contract was awarded by a ‘regional consortium’ of local councils and schools called the East of England Broadband Network.
It has hired Place Group to essentially act as a middleman, matching up companies which can work on green projects like installing solar panels and improving waste management with local councils, schools and hospitals.
Place Group isn't being paid £70 billion, but rather £70 billion is the maximum amount that can be procured through the procurement framework it has been hired to run.
