Put It In Scale

8.4 million people receive Universal Credit. 1.6 million of them are required to look for work.

Most social security spending goes to pensioners, not the unemployed. Most Universal Credit claimants are not required to look for work.

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CPI inflation is 3.5% in September 2026, below 11.1% in October 2022. A lower rate does not mean lower prices.

Lower inflation means prices are rising more slowly. It does not put prices back down.

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Debt is 94.0% of GDP. The deficit is 4.4%. They are not the same kind of number.

Debt is a stock, built up over time. The deficit and debt interest are flows, moving each year. None of the three is the other.

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Defence spending is up 53% in cash since 2010. In real terms, it is up 5% — and the armed forces are 28% smaller.

Both spending claims are true at once: cash spending is up sharply, real-terms growth is much smaller, and the force is smaller than in 2010.

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Asylum support, resettlement and accommodation cost £4.2bn in 2025-26, and fell. Britain’s ageing population is projected to cost hundreds of billions more.

Asylum support costs billions. Britain's ageing population is projected to cost far more — but no official model links the two.

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Britain's poorest 40% of households own 5% of the country's wealth. The richest tenth own 40.7%.

Wealth is heavily concentrated at the top: the bottom 40% of households hold about a twentieth of Britain's wealth, the top 10% hold about two-fifths.

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Benefit fraud and unpaid tax: how big are the losses?

Benefit fraud is real, but far smaller than the tax gap and several other lines on this chart.

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More non-doms left Britain after the 2017 reform. The Treasury still made over £1bn more.

Both are true: departures rose because of the reform, and the Treasury still ended up with over £1bn more per year from those who stayed.

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PPE Medpro: a £200m contract, and a £122m court judgment against it

A £122m court judgment against PPE Medpro is real. Whether it is actually recovered from a company in administration is not yet known.

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813,000 people arrived. Net migration was 171,000. Both numbers are true.

A falling net migration figure does not mean fewer people are arriving — it can mean more people are also leaving.

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The UK does not publish a national crime rate by immigration or asylum status.

Anyone giving you a definitive national crime rate for migrants or asylum seekers is using data that cannot establish it — in either direction.

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7.37m treatment pathways are waiting. About 6.24 million people are.

This counts treatments, not people. The headline overcounts by about a million, and the underlying backlog is still historically enormous.

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Crime measured by survey has more than halved since 2010. Knife offences have not.

Overall crime, measured by survey, is far lower than in 2010. Knife offences specifically are not — both are true at once.

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Labour won 33.7% of the vote and 63.2% of the seats. That is not a miscount.

Westminster seats are won locally, one constituency at a time. National vote share does not translate proportionally under First Past the Post.

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The Sovereign Grant was £132.1m in 2025–26 (£137.9m for 2026–27). The full public cost of the monarchy is not published.

Both the "it costs £X" and the "it pays for itself" slogans claim more precision than the published data can show.

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