BBC News Reality Check

Top Stories

Claims investigated

Must See

Latest Updates

  1. Are Biden’s strict vaccine rules working?

    Reality Check

    President Joe Biden says the tough regulations he put in place for federal government workers and those in larger private companies to be vaccinated are paying off.

    In a speech yesterday in Chicago, Biden said the imposition of "vaccination requirements results in more people getting vaccinated".

    From the end of July, all US federal workers have been required either to be vaccinated or undergo regular testing. And in September this was extended to cover companies with more than 100 employees.

    Chart showing US daily vaccinations

    However, US vaccination data presents a more complicated picture than Biden suggests.

    When the new rules were imposed on federal workers in July, vaccinations were already on an upward trend which continued largely unchanged following the introduction of the policy.

    When the policy was widened to include large private companies in September, there was a brief uptick mid-month but the prevailing falling trend then continued following this spike.

    So there is little to suggest from the US government’s own data that the introduction of tougher government requirements has had a significant impact on the overall rate of vaccination across the US.

    Vaccinations have begun to pick up in recent weeks and currently about 850,000 doses a day are being administered.

  2. Are real wages rising or falling?

    Robert Cuffe

    BBC head of statistics

    Raab

    Justice Secretary Dominic Raab told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning that “real wages are rising on the latest quarterly figures”.

    Real wages is a measure that takes account of rising prices, so it reflects what the money you earn actually buys.

    The most recent figures – for July – are higher than they were a year ago (when the nation was coming out of the first lockdown).

    GFX graph

    But that growth mainly happened in the months up to last November.

    The most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics suggested that growth might be stalling since then, with real wages looking lower in July than they were in April.

    The Office for National Statistics, who collate these figures, say that the effects of lockdowns, furlough and other government support will be playing out in the figures for some time to come and so warn against reading too much into peaks and troughs in the data.

  3. Is the UK really a world leader in tackling money laundering?

    Reality Check

    The chancellor was asked on the Today programme about the Pandora Papers, which expose money laundering, including in the UK.

    Rishi Sunak said: “The independent global body FATF said when they last looked at this in 2018 that we were probably one of the world’s best places to tackle money laundering.”

    The Financial Action Task Force is a global watchdog against money laundering, which is the process of hiding where criminally obtained money came from.

    It does not do comparisons between countries, and its 2018 report does not describe the UK as one of the best places in the world to tackle money laundering.

    The Treasury pointed us towards something it published when the FATF report came out in 2018, in which it highlighted the fact that the UK had received the top rating - “high” - in four of the 11 key areas that FATF judges.

    But the UK also received only a “moderate” rating in three of the areas, although its ratings did compare favourably with other countries being assessed at the time.

    While FATF does not compare countries, another organisation brings out the Basel AML (anti-money laundering) index, which ranks countries based on FATF’s methodology.

    The UK comes out as the 18th lowest-risk country out of 110, coming behind countries such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Australia and Israel.

  4. Starmer’s claim about petrol costs

    Reality Check

    On fuel shortages, Keir Starmer told his party conference: “A tank of fuel already costs £10 more than it did at the start of the year.”

    That’s about right.

    In the first week of the year, the average UK price for a litre of petrol was about 115p, while diesel was about 120p a litre, according to government figures.

    The latest figure is 135p for petrol and 138p for diesel.

    So you would need a fuel tank of about 50 litres, which is a pretty normal midsize car, to be paying £10 more for a tankful.

  5. Starmer’s claim on police numbers

    Reality Check

    Keir Starmer told his party conference: “Over 11 years of Tory government, we have lost more than 8,000 police officers.”

    The most recent figures we have for full-time equivalent police officers in England and Wales is from 31 March this year, when there were 135,301.

    That’s 8,433 fewer than the figure for 31 March 2010, which was just over a month before the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government came to power.

    At the low-point in 2018, the figure was almost 20,000 officers below the 2010 level.

    The government promised in 2019 to recruit 20,000 more police officers by 2023, which would return numbers close to their 2010 levels.