It was the big speech about the big society. And as David Cameron had his Kitchener moment, he reeled off a legion of lists, a cacophony of claims and a smattering of statistics to make his point. Here’s a selection, scrutinised by the FactCheck team.
The analysis
“But just look at what we are achieving already – together, in the national interest. 200 new academies.”
Steady on! 200 academies may be open by the end of the academic year, but certainly not yet. According to figures released last week by the Department for Education, of the 189 schools which have applied for academy status under Michael Gove’s plans, 143 have been given permission to go ahead. Yet only 55 of those have actually been set up so far. Add to those that have been approved under the coalition government a further 64 academies that replaced failing schools in September, plus another 10 that will open in April 2011 – all given the green light under the previous Labour government – and you top the 200 mark.
“10,000 university places.”
FactCheck has looked at this before – the coalition says they have created 10,000 places, Labour accuses them of cutting 10,000 places. In fact there are more university places, but not as many more as Labour planned. Had Gordon Brown won the election, he wanted 20,000 places.
“The NHS – protected.”
David Cameron has repeatedly said that the NHS budget will be ringfenced from the spending cuts. But that’s not the same as saying it will enjoy the kind of cash bonanza it saw under Labour. As CutsCheck found last week, the NHS will not be as well funded as it has been over the last decade, and Trusts are already starting to squeeze their budgets.
“It’s stopped us slipping into the nightmare they’ve seen in Greece, confidence falling, interest rates rising, jobs lost and in the end, not less but more drastic spending cuts than if you’d acted decisively in the first place.”
It’s all Greek to David Cameron. Both before and after the election, he’s repeatedly invoked the memory of the financial crisis in Greece as a harbinger of the economic doom that faced Britain if we failed to cut spending. But most experts, including the Governor of the Bank of England, say we can’t make direct comparisons because our economy – our credit ratings, the way our debts are structured, and the fact that we’re not in the euro – is different from the Greek economy.
“There were nearly a million violent crimes a year.”
Here we go again. Crime statistics are notoriously used and abused by politicians.
There are two sets of figures to measure crime – the British Crime Survey and recorded crime figures. The BCS shows that violent crime in fact went down by 41 per cent under Labour. According to a Home Office statistical bulletin, this shows that the growth in violent recorded crime “should be attributed, at least in large part, to a change in recording practice”.
For more details, look again at FactCheck’s previous work.
