This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact-checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
How many people has Labour ‘deported’?
We have recently seen several claims about the total number of immigration returns being the number of people “deported” from the UK.
In a radio interview last Monday, border security minister Dame Angela Eagle said: “We have already deported, sent home, 19,000 people with no right to be here.”
This figure refers to the number of returns of people without the right to be in the UK under the current Labour government up to January 31 2025, which was 18,987. (More recent data shows there were 24,103 such returns up to March 22 2025)
Dame Angela made a similar claim in Parliament in February, saying “18,987 people with no right to be here have been deported”. Labour MPs Mike Tapp and Preet Kaur Gill have also previously referred to the number of people returned as the number deported, as have some media.
However not all immigration returns meet the official definition of a “deportation”, and many involve people leaving the UK voluntarily. Last year then-prime minister Rishi Sunak corrected the record after he similarly referred to combined enforced and voluntary returns as people having been “deported”.
The Home Office states: “The term ‘deportations’ refers to a legally defined subset of returns, which are enforced either following a criminal conviction, or when it is judged that a person’s removal from the UK is beneficial to the public good.”
We do not know how many of the 18,987 returns under Labour up to January 31, or the 24,103 returns under Labour up to March 22, were officially classified as “deportations”. But enforced returns – the category of returns that includes deportations – accounted only for a minority of the total, 27% and 26% respectively.
Returns of people who are in the UK without a right to stay here fall into two broad categories: enforced returns (those carried out by the Home Office), and voluntary returns (those where someone liable to be returned leaves of their own accord, either with or without support from the Home Office).
The Home Office describes voluntary returns with no involvement from the government as “other verified returns”.
Because the 19,000 figure referenced by Dame Angela is from ad-hoc data, we don’t know exactly what proportion were “other verified returns”. But the most recently published official statistics show that between July and December 2024, there were 6,150 “other verified returns” – accounting for 35% of all returns.
When we contacted the Home Office about Dame Angela’s comments it referred us to the latest ad-hoc release data. We also contacted Mr Tapp and Ms Gill for comment.
Was Netflix’s Adolescence based on a true story?
Several viral social media posts in mid-March suggested Netflix drama Adolescence, which tells the story of a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a teenage girl, was based on a real case involving a black boy, even though the drama’s main character was white.
And in interviews on April 1, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch appeared to make a similar claim, saying she understood “that the boy who committed that crime was not white”.
However, the show’s co-creators have said the series isn’t based on any single case, though one has said it was inspired by several real-life incidents.
The series has been linked on social media to various different real-life cases. For example, one viral post on X shared a screenshot of a news article, which it said was an image of “the person it was based on”. The article in question reported that a teenager, Hassan Sentamu, had been jailed for life after murdering a 15-year-old girl with a kitchen knife in Croydon.
Claims about Adolescence being based on a true story appear to have stemmed at least in part from interviews last month with the show’s co-creator Stephen Graham.
Mr Graham, who also acted in the drama, said in an article published on March 4: “Where it came from, for me… is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?
“Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up north, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on?”
Although we’ve not seen any quotes from Mr Graham specifying which incidents he was referring to, other than Brianna Ghey’s murder, several media reports have suggested that the London stabbing he mentioned was the murder committed by Sentamu, which occurred at a bus stop.
None of the reports suggested Adolescence was based on a single true story, however, and in a subsequent interview on a podcast – on March 26, before Mrs Badenoch’s remarks – the drama’s co-writer and co-creator Jack Thorne said there was no truth to claims the characters had been “race-swapped”.
He said: “I have told a lot of real-life stories in my time. I know the harm that can come when you take elements of a real-life story, and you put it on screen, and the people aren’t expecting it. There is no part of this that’s based on a true story, not one single part.”
We contacted Mrs Badenoch for comment.
Did MPs suggest UK taxpayers should pay for an airport in Pakistan?
Social media posts have suggested MPs are campaigning for UK taxpayers to fund the construction of a new international airport in Pakistan. But these claims are misleading – there’s no evidence the MPs concerned have suggested any such thing.
One post on X with more than 1,500 shares, which has since been deleted, said: “Look who signed a letter to build on British tax payers money an airport in Pakistan…. Why should we pay to build an airport in Pakistan![sic]”
A group of UK MPs and peers have signed a letter to Pakistan’s Prime Minister in support of an international airport in Mirpur. But the letter does not call for this to be funded by the UK, and there’s no evidence this has been suggested.
Labour MP Mohammad Yasin, whose office’s letterhead is on the letter, told Full Fact: “Regarding the recent letter in question, it was clearly addressed to the Prime Minister of Pakistan and does not suggest, as some have falsely claimed, that UK taxpayer money should be spent on this project.”
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