Rishi Sunak’s claim during the first TV debate that a Labour government would hit households with a £2,000 tax hike is an “unreliable figure based on multiple assumptions,” say independent fact-checking experts.
Full Fact, which since 2010 has weeded out lies, half truths and false statements in election campaigns and politics more broadly, gave a damning verdict of the Prime Minister’s central line of attack in the ITV showdown against Sir Keir Starmer on Tuesday night.
Mr Sunak repeatedly accused the Labour leader of planning a tax hit on Britain which would be £2,000 for a household, with the Tories stepping up its attack on this line on Wednesday morning.
“But this figure is unreliable and based on multiple assumptions,” said Full Fact, which now uses AI to rapidly identify potentially false statements and check them out, with its conclusions “reached and confirmed” by its team of human fact checkers.
“Labour has repeatedly disputed the figures on the grounds that they are based on flawed data provided to the Treasury by Conservative political advisers,” it added.
Chris Morris, chief executive of Full Fact stressed: “It’s clearly unacceptable to present your own analysis as the conclusions of independent civil servants when it’s not.
“Public trust in politics is hanging by a thread and a high-profile falsehood will turn even more people away from the democratic process.
“We want to see this corrected as soon as possible.”
Many of the figures in the Conservative document, claiming a Labour tax hit of £38 billion, come from Government costings of opposition policies published earlier this year, but some of the figures come from other sources, Full Fact added.
It also highlighted a letter from the Treasury’s top civil servant James Bowler, to shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones, which stressed that “civil servants were not involved in the production or presentation of the Conservative Party’s document ‘Labour’s Tax Rises’ or in the calculation of the total figure used”.
The senior Whitehall mandarin went on to say “any costings derived from other sources or produced by other organisation should not be presented as having been produced by the Civil Service”.
Mr Bowler stated that he had reminded ministers and special advisers “that this should be the case”.
Full Fact, which is planning to issue a further analysis of the Tory £2,000 tax claim, stressed: “When politicians and political parties make broad estimates, it’s important they are clear about what calculations they’ve done and the limitations of any figures they quote.”
* Full Fact’s AI tools utilise multiple large language models to enhance human fact checkers’ ability to rapidly and expansively monitor news and social media to identify claims that need checking, including repeated claims already known to be false, in as close to real-time as possible.
All conclusions are reached and confirmed by Full Fact’s team of professional fact checkers, it added.
