By Reality Check teamBBC Newsimage source, PA MediaLabour leader Keir Starmer has promised a "serious plan for government", in his first in-person
By Reality Check team
BBC News
image source, PA MediaLabour leader Keir Starmer has promised a “serious plan for government”, in his first in-person speech to his party’s annual conference.
He also made a series of claims about the Conservatives’ record in government.
‘98% of reported rape cases do not end in a criminal charge’
In the year to March 2020, 1.4% of rapes recorded by police led to a charge or summons, meaning more than 98% did not, the latest Home Office figures show.
The number and proportion of rape cases leading to a charge have fallen every year since 2013.
This has been attributed to a number of factors, including:
- funding cuts
- victims being more likely to withdraw their complaints rather than go through the, often intrusive, court process
- the vast quantity of digital evidence that now complicates cases
You can read more about this here.
‘Britain has the worst [Covid] death toll in Europe’
BBC Reality Check looked into this claim in May, when Labour’s Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner, made it.
The UK does have the highest number of recorded deaths in Europe (if you exclude Russia), just over 136,000 – ahead of Italy, on nearly 131,000 deaths.
But these figures do not take into account population size.
Italy has a higher rate of deaths per 100,000 people than the UK – and in some other European countries, including Hungary, this rate is significantly higher.
Note: This table, from the BBC’s global tracker, will be updated over time and so, in weeks to come, its figures will not match those in this article.
‘A tank of fuel already costs £10 more than it did at the start of the year’
According to government figures, the average UK price per litre in the first week of the year was:
- £1.15 for petrol
- £1.20 for diesel
- £1.35 for petrol
- £1.38 for diesel
So filling a tank of about 50 litres (11 gallons), pretty normal for a midsize car, would cost £10 more.
image source, Reuters‘Over 11 years of Tory government, we have lost more than 8,000 police officers’
The most recent figure, from 31 March, for full-time-equivalent police officers in England and Wales is 135,301 – 8,433 fewer than the figure for 31 March 2010, just over a month before the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government came to power.
At its lowest, in 2018, the figure was almost 20,000 officers below the 2010 level.
In 2019, the government promised to recruit 20,000 more police officers by 2023, which would return numbers close to their 2010 levels.
‘The Tories inherited plans from Labour to make every new home zero carbon. They scrapped them and now we have a crisis in energy prices, emissions from homes have increased’
The Conservatives did indeed scrap Gordon Brown’s zero-carbon homes policy, in 2015, the year before it was supposed to come into force.
UK residential emissions – from homes, from heating and electricity – had actually been falling pretty consistently:
- 156.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, in 2010
- 96.9 million, in 2019
But in 2020, residential emissions from heating did go up (by 6.7%) – which may be down to more people staying at home during the pandemic.
‘After a decade of Tory government… wages have fallen in every English region’
Actually, average wages have risen steadily under the Conservatives – but they have not always kept up with rising prices, which Labour told us was what Keir Starmer was talking about.
In every region of England, the average wage bought 1-5% less in April 2020 than in April 2010, according to House of Commons analysis of the most recent published figures.
But April 2020 was the first month of furlough in the UK and wages were in the middle of their largest fall since the crash of 2008.
Average wages have bounced back and now buy about 5-7% more than they did in April 2020.
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