A miscellany of facts, factuals and fact-like assertions from the Palace of Westminster over the last week. The phrasing of some has been lightly rearranged.
STEPHANIE PEACOCK: Barnsley has the fourth highest level of tooth decay in the country.
JAMES MURRAY: We have the draughtiest homes in Europe.
JEREMY HUNT: We are spending £37 billion to support millions of low-income households.
ALISON THEWLISS: Angela’s gas bill has gone up from £130 to £260 a month. She lives in a tiny, two-bedroom flat.
LAURA FARRIS: Ministerial severance was paid to more than 300 ministers under the Blair and Brown governments, including Peter Mandelson who got this twice in 24 months.
TOBY PERKINS: Since 2010, 800,000 fewer under-45 households own their own homes.
MARGARET FERRIER: Men account for three quarters of all suicides, and it is the leading cause of death in men under 50 here in the UK.
ALAN BROWN: Only six low emission buses out of the 4,000 promised by Boris Johnson have entered service in England.
RISHI SUNAK: We are in the process of providing 25,000 pieces of winter equipment for the brave Ukrainian soldiers.
ANDREW SELOUS: In 2020, 570 new priests were ordained and there were 580 in training, with only 320 retirements.
GEORGE EUSTICE: While we are about to open our market to unbridled access for Australian beef, Australia remains one of the few countries left in the world that maintains an absolute import ban for British beef.
PHILIP HOLLOBONE: Despite record extra funding, so far this year the NHS has treated 656,000 fewer patients than during the same period in pre-pandemic 2019—a drop of 5%.
PENNY MORDAUNT: One in 20 people in England are waiting over a year for treatment. It is one in four in Wales.
KIM JOHNSON: As of September 2022, 2,890 people are still held under the now-abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence. Seventy-four prisoners have committed suicide,
SARAH DINES: The Home Office allocated £24.5 million to protect mosques and Muslim faith schools through the Places of Worship: Protective Security Funding Scheme in May 2022
BOB BLACKMAN: The President of Iran, President Raisi, was responsible as the prosecutor in Iran for 30,000 executions of political prisoners in 1988.
BAMBOS CHARALAMBOUS: 227 Iranian parliamentarians have supported calls for the 15,000 detainees to face the harshest punishment—the death penalty—with only 63 voting against.
JIM SHANNON: A revolutionary court in Tehran has started sentencing protesters to death on charges that allegedly include “enmity against God” and “corruption on earth”.
CRISPIN BLUNT: Egypt has 60,000 political prisoners.
YVETTE COOPER: Of the 16,000 asylum seekers referred to the Third Country Unit, just 21 were returned to their country of origin.
SCOTT BENTON: Senior police officers tell me that the majority of the serious organised crime and the drugs trade in Blackpool is now orchestrated by Albanian gangs.
SAJID JAVID: The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse recently reported that there were 8.8 million attempts to access child sexual abuse imagery online in the UK in a single month.
MARSHA DE CORDOVA: Some 799 children aged between 10 and 17 were strip-searched by the Met between 2019 and 2021 without any being arrested.
MIRIAM CATES: Analysis of 130,000 titles of videos that were recommended to first-time users of Pornhub and other major sites found that one in every eight described sexual activities that constitute sexual violence.
CHRIS PHILP: In October and early November, about 11,000 Metropolitan police officer shifts were lost as a result of having to police Just Stop Oil’s outrageous and unnecessary protests.
RUTH CADBURY: In Hounslow, there are more than 3,500 asylum seekers waiting for a determination on their applications in, at the last count, 12 interim or contingency hotels.
ROBERT JENRICK: Over 2 million entry clearance visas were issued in the year ending June 2022.
HOLLY LYNCH: Golden visas were available until February 2022 to all who could afford them, including the world’s super-rich, with next to no background checks. Spotlight on Corruption has found that, of all the golden visas issued, around half—that is more than 6,000—have been reviewed for possible national security risks.
MICHAEL GOVE: Significantly more than 10% of social housing homes are below standard – but the proportion of homes that are below standard in the private sector is even higher.
DAVID DAVIS: The Intelligence and Security Committee report on detainee mistreatment found 232 cases where UK personnel “continued to supply questions or intelligence” to other intelligence services after they “knew or suspected the detainees had been or was being mistreated.” I have seen in camera evidence that showed quite how deliberate some of those decisions were – absolutely in the knowledge that they would be used in the process of torture.
CONTESTED STATISTICS
ROBERT JENRICK: 21 organised crime gangs have been dismantled. SUELLA BRAVERMAN: 55 gangs have been dismantled.
ALISTER JACK: The UK Government are providing the Scottish Government with a record block grant settlement of £41 billion a year over the next three years. PATRICIA GIBSON: The Scottish block grant was cut by 4.1% this financial year and is set to be cut by a further 6% in the next financial year. That is a two-year real-terms cut of nearly £5 billion.
DODGY FACTUALS:
CHRIS PHILP: We have invested £170 million in violence reduction units to tackle the root causes of violent crime. These programmes together have been assessed as preventing 49,000 violent offences in their first two years.
ALISON THEWLISS: Austerity is responsible for 330,000 excess deaths.
CHRIS STEPHENS: There are far too many civil servants having to utilise food banks to survive month to month.
DREW HENDRY: For every £490 of damage from the loss of EU trade, the Free Trade deals combined will realise £3.
SUELLA BRAVERMAN: This year to date more than 30,000 crossing attempts have been stopped by the French.
PROBABLY MORE FANCIFUL THAN FACTUAL
ALAN BROWN: in 2020, renewable sources provided almost 100% of the equivalent gross electricity consumption in Scotland.
JAMES CARTLIDGE: The TwinHub project off the coast of Cornwall will deliver enough energy to power 45,000 homes.
A STRAIGHT CONTRADICTION IN TERMS:
TIM FARRON. We are very strongly in favour of free trade, but we also believe that free trade has to be fair.
AND A FINAL QUESTION FOR STEPHEN FLYNN (SNP):
What is the boorach of Brexit?
