FACT CHECK Labour’s energy price freeze: fact checked
“Labour’s fully-funded plan would fix the [energy bill] problems immediately and for the future.” - Keir Starmer
This week the Labour party outlined their plan to freeze the energy price cap for household electricity and gas at the current levels. They estimate the “fully-funded” policy will cost £29 billion.
£8 billion of this will be raised from an additional tax on oil and gas producers. £7 billion in savings on debt interest payments, £12 billion on diverting already planned government spending, and £2 billion on scrapping either Liz Truss’ proposed green levies cut, or Rishi Sunak’s proposed VAT cut.
The problem lies with this final £2 billion.
The Conservative leadership candidates’ proposals are not yet part of the current government budget. That means they still need to be paid for. Their cost doesn’t suddenly become available if they’re scrapped—not without cutting some other part of government spending, or increasing tax or borrowing. This isn’t something Labour has said it would do.
Political campaigns are increasingly built on claims which don't add up.
Labour’s problem is that they relied on spending promises made by the Conservative leadership candidates - but Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss haven’t been clear on how they’ll pay for them, so there’s no real money there.
Yet again, voters are being made promises they can’t believe even though we know that rising energy costs will cause major difficulties for many people.
“There are 1.25 million people with eating disorders and 1 million people using steroids.” - Dr Luke Evans MP
An old claim that a million people in the UK are using anabolic steroids has resurfaced recently. But we’ve found no hard evidence to support the claim. In fact, recent studies suggest the actual number of such users is significantly lower than this.
So where has it come from? The figure is often attributed to the UK Anti-Doping Agency, but it isn’t based on original research by that body. We’ve tracked it down to a quote from a drugs researcher in a Sky News investigation in 2015.
When we contacted the man in question, he admitted his estimate was “crude” - but that hasn’t stopped it being reported as fact by a number of publications (including the BBC, the Metro and the Guardian).
In an attempt to find a consensus on this, a panel of 55 experts recently came together to review all the available data on the number of steroid users in the UK.
The study ultimately estimated that between 328,000 and 687,000 men aged between 15 and 64 in the UK had recently used anabolic steroids in the UK with a central value of 447,000, less than half the commonly quoted figure.
Claims that Italian TV showed a British man shouting "get back to work you fat ponce" at Boris Johnson have been shared on social media. So widespread were the claims that a choicely worded hashtag about the ‘incident’ was trending on Twitter this week.
But there’s no evidence this incident ever happened.
The claims originated from “RS Archer”—a Twitter account which is notorious for fabricating stories and quotes. You might remember this account from a few months ago, when we fact checked a fake tweet - supposedly from Nadine Dorries - claiming that “food doesn’t grow on trees.”
Despite the account’s reputation, we scoured footage and could find no evidence that this happened.
We even contacted Italian fact checking organisation Pagella to ask if they are aware of any footage of the Prime Minister being broadcast on Italian TV. They told us they weren’t aware of the claims and had found no evidence to support them.
