Fact check: BBC head-to-head debate and Conservative video clip

This summary of claims from the campaign trail has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information, as part of the PA news agency’s Election Check 24.

BBC head-to-head debate

On Wednesday the final scheduled televised debate of the election campaign saw the Conservatives’ Rishi Sunak and Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer go head-to-head on the BBC.

Tax was unsurprisingly a key focus.

Sir Keir claimed Rishi Sunak has “raised tax 26 times”. Although we don’t know which specific tax rises he had in mind, we’ve previously seen Labour quote a similar figure, claiming there had been 25 tax rises since the last General Election, and it’s unclear how the party arrived at that exact figure.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies says it’s likely there have been hundreds of specific tax rises and reductions since 2019, and what’s more significant is that we’ve just seen “the biggest tax-raising parliament in modern times”.

Mr Sunak meanwhile asked: “Can you afford to pay £2,000 more in tax [under Labour]?”

That’s a reference to one of the most prominent Conservative claims we’ve heard throughout this campaign—that families supposedly face a £2,000 tax rise under Labour. But that’s misleading because the figure is unreliable and based on a number of questionable assumptions. It comes from a Conservative estimate of Labour’s “unfunded spending commitments”, but many of the costings behind the calculation are uncertain.

Mr Sunak also said that pensioners would be “paying tax for the first time” under a Labour government. It’s true that the ongoing personal allowance freeze, which Labour has said it would maintain, is forecast to mean that by 2028, for the first time, someone whose sole income comes from the state pension would have to pay income tax. However, some pensioners whose income is not solely from the state pension do already pay tax on their income, if their total income exceeds the personal allowance.

On other topics, Sir Keir said “nearly eight million people are on the waiting list”.

That’s not what NHS England data shows. There are 7.6 million cases on the waiting list, involving about 6.3 million patients. There are always more cases than people in the data, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing.

The leaders also discussed the number of small boat arrivals, which Mr Sunak said had “come down over the last 12 months”.

On this, he was right — the numbers are down in the last 12 months, compared to the previous year. But the figures by calendar year paint a different picture. So far in 2024 provisional figures show the number of small boat arrivals is up 16% compared with the same period last year.

Conservative video clip

A video shared by the Conservatives on X (formerly Twitter) appears to show Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves pause for several seconds during a BBC Breakfast interview, as if she was struggling to respond when asked about public spending under a future Labour government.

It was posted with the caption “Cat got your tongue, Rachel?”, and shared by several Conservative candidates.

But the full video of the interview shows there were actually technical issues on the line, and Ms Reeves went on to respond to the question after the interviewer put it to her a second time.