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Should we make cycle helmets compulsory?
“A drunk cyclist was more likely to get hurt – and less likely to wear a helmet. But it was the booze, not the helmet, that had the biggest impact.”
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FactCheck Q&A: London 2012 special
“How many medals will we win? This one’s a bit easier. The answer’s 62. Fact.”
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What’s fuelling British Gas’s profits?
“We think the suggestion that today’s figures are just a return to the norm after a particularly lean spell last year is dubious.”
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Minister in the thick of it over new jobs?
An “administrative error” leads to the home office advertising for 400 more jobs than they had intended to, on the day of an ongoing row between the unions and the department in which strike action was narrowly averted. FactCheck investigates.
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FactCheck Q&A: Spotlight on the black economy
“What the government isn’t saying today is something many economists agree on: a black market in services produces benefits to the economy as well as costs.”
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Is G4S trying to get paid twice?
“You essentially recruit the best people for your own organisation but instead of paying for the cost of vetting, interviewing, training and trialling them yourself, the taxpayer picks up the bill because those things are covered by the 2012 contract. You then collect from the taxpayer a second time because the people you recruited were on the Work Programme and you got them off the dole queue.”
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Raining on London Mayor’s Olympics parade
Boris Johnson claims to have statistics showing it rains more in Rome than in London. It’s a shame he can’t pass them on to FactCheck.
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IDS’s work and benefits claims put to the test
Iain Duncan Smith believes his benefits cap is already driving people into work. FactCheck hasn’t found much evidence to suggest that to be the case.
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How many pensioners are selling their homes to pay for care?
“When we contacted both those organisations, they distanced themselves from the claim, saying they had never made any assessment of how many homes are sold each year to finance healthcare.”
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Divorce, bank accounts and Balls
Shadow chancellor Ed Balls claims we’re more likely to be divorced than to change our bank accounts. FactCheck investigates whether we really love our banks more than our partners.
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Is the Work Programme worse than nothing?
Even if the government did absolutely nothing to help them, a certain percentage of people would find work off their own bat. The Work Programme can only be said to be “working” – or having any effect at all – if providers are doing better than this “non-intervention” rate.
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NHS spending unspun
“The strange picture being painted for us is one of the biggest bureacratic machines in Whitehall being taken by surprise by its own success in making efficiency savings, and choosing to hand the extra cash back to the Treasury.”
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Is there an atom of truth in Cameron’s science rhetoric?
The “big step forward” is the discovery of the Higgs boson particle at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Don’t worry – we’re not going try to FactCheck the existence of the “God particle”.
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Anatomy of a banking scandal
“The BBA professed to be “shocked” at the report into wrongdoing at Barclays today, but the long history of its involvement in this scandal makes that difficult to believe.”
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FactCheck Q&A: Where will Barclays’ fines go?
The FSA’s fined Barclays £59.5m. Quite a sum. Under current rules, the beneficiaries of the fine will be Barclays’ colleagues in the financial services industry. FactCheck investigates.