Fact check: Unemployment figures row and NHS appointments error
Round-up of fact checks from the last week compiled by Full Fact.
This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Unemployment figures row
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, we heard conflicting claims about how unemployment figures have changed since Labour came into government.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch claimed that “unemployment is up 10% since the election”, but was later challenged by Labour MP Jake Richards, who raised a point of order and claimed that this figure was “completely and utterly incorrect”.
There are several different sources of unemployment data, and the exact change in unemployment figures since the election depends on the source and precise time period considered.
According to a Conservative Party post on X (formerly Twitter), Mrs Badenoch’s claim that unemployment is up 10% was based on data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) on the number of people who are unemployed.
In the period April-June 2024 (the last full period before the general election on 4 July 2024) an estimated 1,467,000 people were unemployed, according to the survey. As of January-March 2025 (the latest data available) this figure stood at 1,614,000, a 10% increase.
However the headline unemployment rate (the number of unemployed people divided by the economically active population) increased over this period from 4.2% to 4.5%, an increase of around 7%, or 0.3 percentage points. Mr Richards confirmed to Full Fact it was the unemployment rate which he was referring to in his point of order, when he described Mrs Badenoch’s claim as “incorrect”, he told us that he believed unemployment relative to employment was “the only useful metric”.
It’s worth noting that both sets of statistics are published as three-month averages, and the picture they give of how unemployment has changed varies significantly depending on the exact starting point used.
When we asked the Office for National Statistics (ONS) about this, it told us that if a particular month is of interest, it would usually choose a period where that month is the midpoint. Comparing June-August 2024 (the midpoint of which is July 2024, when the general election was held) with the most recent data, for instance, shows a 12% increase in the number of unemployed people and a 10% increase in the unemployment rate.
Comparing July-September 2024 with the most recent data, as some have suggested, shows a 7% increase in the number of unemployed people and a 5% increase in the unemployment rate, though Labour was already in office for the vast majority of this baseline period.
Importantly, all comparisons based on LFS data over this period come with a health warning. The ONS currently says that due to increased volatility in LFS data, “estimates of change should be treated with additional caution”.
The ONS advises that people “make use of a wide range of data sources to inform their views on the labour market, balancing the information provided across survey and administrative data sources as well as data on relevant concepts like earnings and vacancies”.
An alternative measure of unemployment to LFS-based data, also published by the ONS, is the claimant count, which measures the number of people receiving benefits for the principal reason of being unemployed.
The provisional claimant count in April 2025 was 1.726 million. This is roughly 5% up on June 2024 (the last full month of the Conservative government), but about 2% down on July 2024 (when Labour took office).
NHS appointments error
NHS England has corrected a mistake in its calculation of the number of extra hospital appointments delivered so far by the Labour government, after Full Fact challenged the error.
NHS England initially claimed the new data, which is an official statistic, showed a 3.3 million rise in the appointments counted towards the government’s manifesto commitment, when it was first published on Thursday morning. The figure was used in an NHS England press release, and cited in a comment by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, that was quoted in the media.
But this figure comes from data that has been standardised to take account of the different number of working days in the periods being compared. And NHS England’s calculation mistakenly assumed there were 20 working days in February 2024. In fact, 2024 was a leap year, and there were no public holidays that February, so that month had 21 working days.
As a result, the correct figure for the increase in appointments seen between July 2024 and February 2025, compared to the same period the previous year, is about 3.6 million. NHS England republished the data to include this figure after we told it about the problem, and released a correction to its statement.
The new statement said: “There was a calculation error in the file covering the number of additional appointments delivered since July. This has been updated from 3.3 million to 3.6 million.”
However at the time of writing the incorrect figure continues to appear in some news reports.
Before the 2024 general election, Labour promised to deliver an extra two million hospital appointments each year, although the party was not clear exactly what this meant.
Then in February, NHS England began to publish data on the specific types of appointments being counted towards the pledge. At the same time, the Government announced that it had been achieved. We have been monitoring this pledge on our Government Tracker.
Full Fact’s annual report
And finally… this week Full Fact published its annual report reviewing how the UK handles misinformation – and the verdict is not good. We’ve taken a deep-dive into some of the fact checking themes we’ve seen this year and have concluded that almost every dimension of misinformation policy needs urgent action, from legislation through to online platform policies.
Our analysis of cases, including claims from the UK summer riots, footage from conflict zones and examples of health misinformation, as well as our recommendations for getting to grips with this out-of-control landscape, are available to read here.
