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| - On 12 June the Prime Minister and Conservative leader Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer both featured on a special Sky News programme, ‘The Battle for Number 10’.
The show was broadcast live from Grimsby. The format saw both Mr Sunak and Mr Starmer take part in separate 20-minute interviews, led by Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby. They then took questions, again separately, from a studio audience for 25 minutes each.
The Full Fact team ‘live fact checked’ both sets of interviews and Q&As, though on this occasion we heard more checkable claims from the Prime Minister. Mr Starmer did trail the Labour party’s upcoming manifesto launch, which we’ll be covering in full on Thursday.
Here’s a round-up of some of the claims we looked at from Grimsby.
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Tax
Mr Sunak claimed there would be a “retirement tax for every pensioner in the UK” under a Labour government.
That claim stems from the Conservatives saying their ‘Triple Lock Plus’ plan would save the “average pensioner” £1,000 in income tax over the next parliament, compared to the current rules (which Labour would maintain). We’ve written more about this claim here.
Mr Starmer meanwhile made a claim we’ve heard a lot in the last few weeks—that the so-called ‘tax burden’ is the highest in 70 years. This was true in 2022/23. It’s since fallen slightly, but is forecast to increase over each of the next five years to a near-record level, as we wrote last month.
Migration and small boats
Mr Sunak said net migration is down 10% “since I’ve been in charge”.
Net migration in 2023 was down 10% on 2022. (Mr Sunak became Prime Minister on 25 October 2022.)
But the net migration figure for 2023 was still nearly four times what it was in 2019, when the Conservative manifesto pledged to bring down “overall numbers”. We wrote more about these numbers last month.
Mr Sunak also said small boat crossings “were down last year by a third” and “are down over the last 12 months by a little less than that”.
By our calculations, he was right on both counts.
But as Ms Rigby pointed out, provisional figures so far this year are up compared to the same period last year—we make it a 35% rise.
NHS waiting lists
In a discussion on waiting lists, Mr Sunak mentioned “the impact the industrial action has had”.
It’s hard to be sure what impact strikes have had on waiting lists, but analysis by both think tanks and the NHS suggests they’ve had some effect.
We’ve written more about NHS strikes and waiting lists in our explainer.
Police numbers
Finally, Mr Sunak claimed police numbers are at a “record high”.
That’s not quite what the latest published data shows, though earlier last year numbers were the highest since comparable records began in 2003.
The number of full-time-equivalent police officers in England and Wales peaked at 147,430 in March 2023, but fell slightly to 147,098 in September 2023. There was a similar small drop in headcount.
Image courtesy of HM Treasury/UK Parliament.
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