FACT CHECK The Bank of England hasn’t spent £65bn ‘to prop up the markets’
You may well have seen claims over the past week, that the Bank of England spent £65bn to support the UK economy. We’ve seen this being said by journalists, high profile social media users and a Labour MP. But it’s not true.
This figure stems from a statement saying the Bank was prepared to spend £5bn buying bonds every weekday between September 28th and October 14th. If they did spend this maximum amount of £5bn in each of those 13 weekdays, it would total £65bn.
But just because they were prepared to spend this much, that doesn’t mean they did. It’s not yet the 14th of October, but we already know it won’t be as much as £65bn. The Bank spent £3.7bn over the first five days of the operation. This is a lot less than the £25bn maximum amount they were prepared to spend.
We’ve been scrutinising claims being made at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, which wrapped up this week.
Liz Truss gave the keynote speech, covering the government’s recent policy announcements and talking about her upbringing, the economic climate, healthcare and more. We looked at five claims in detail:
Also speaking at the conference was chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, who claimed that Labour had left government with “record unemployment”. That’s not right.
Labour left government in May 2010 when the UK unemployment rate was 7.9%. It rose further to a peak of 8.5% a year later, with 2.7 million people unemployed.
But this was not a record. Unemployment was higher for most of the 1980s, reaching a peak of 11.9% in 1984. It was also higher in 1992. And current records only go back fifty years, so we can’t compare to any time before 1971.
We've received questions from a number of readers about a (now-deleted) tweet shared by the Treasury promoting its recent policy announcements in the mini-Budget.
Posted on 29 September, it said: “Thanks to the Growth Plan, a typical first-time buyer in London moving into a representative terraced house will save £11,250 on stamp duty & £1,050 on the household's energy bills—and if they earn £30,000 almost an additional £400 on tax. This is around £12,700 in total.”
The figures themselves are accurate, but would appear to be based on a very specific set of assumptions about the profile of the hypothetical “first-time buyer”, whoappears not to be “typical” in a variety of important ways.
