Hospices across the UK provide vital end of life care for many, but they’re facing a financial crisis which is forcing them to make huge cuts as costs rise and demand for their services goes up.

The government does provide some funding, giving hospices in England and Wales more than 450 million pounds in the latest data from 2024.

However, exclusive data we obtained from Hospice UK found that in that same year, the actual cost to those same hospices of delivering care was around 1.2 billion pounds.

That means a funding gap of around 745 million pounds that hospices have had to finance themselves.

And our figures show this funding gap has worsened over the years.

In 2012, the gap was 414 million pounds, and apart from a dip during Covid due to extra government funding, this has got bigger and bigger, rising to £650m in 2023 and £745m in 2024.

Hospices have had to fundraise more and more to try and cover the shortfall, for example through running charity shops..

We’ve excluded the cost of these fundraising activities from this analysis, so it’s just looking at spending on delivering care.

Toby Porter, CEO of Hospice UK, told us: “The rising gap between the government funding hospices receive and the cost of delivering their care confirms what we have been saying for some time: the current hospice funding model is not fit for purpose.”

He explained that although hospices “cherish the generosity of their local communities”, they are “all too often dependent on these communities giving more and more to bridge the gap”.

It is “clear” that the gap between government funding and the cost of delivering care “has become untenable”, and that it is “ultimately the patients who pay the price”, Mr Porter added.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told us: “Hospices play a vital role in delivering high-quality end of life care, supporting patients and their families at the most difficult time in their lives.

“That’s why we have made the biggest investment in hospices in a generation, with £125 million to improve facilities, and a further £80 million for children’s and young people’s hospices. However, we understand that even with this funding, there are some hospices that are having to make difficult decisions about services.

“We are working with local NHS leaders to find ways in which we can create a more sustainable funding model for hospices so they can continue supporting patients and families when they need it most.”

Announcing the new policy, he said: “We’re taking immediate action to cut taxes on energy bills, put more money in people’s pockets and bring back hope.”

But FactCheck calculations suggest total energy bills will still rise overall, even after VAT is removed from electricity.

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

The amount you pay for your energy is based on the price cap set by the regulator, Ofgem. All of these figures relate to England, Scotland and Wales as energy prices are set differently in Northern Ireland.

Ofgem updates the price cap every three months and on that basis calculates how much the average home can expect to pay over the course of a year.

In October 2025, the Ofgem price cap meant that average household annual electricity and gas bills came to a combined £1,755.

Using the same methodology, the company Cornwall Insight predicted in July this year that from October 2026, the total average bill will be £1,849.

That means, all things being equal, the total yearly gas and electricity bill would have risen by £94 a year between October 2025 and October 2026.

Getting rid of the existing 5 per cent VAT rate on electricity will reduce that part of the bill by around £45 on average. But once you account for rises in gas, it would still mean combined annual energy bills going up this year by £49.

The increase is being driven by the rise in wholesale gas prices, which have been pushed up by the conflict in the Middle East.

Throughout these calculations, we’re talking about average household energy use, which is calculated by Ofgem. If you use more or less than the average household, your bill – and your savings – will be different.

We should also say that from 1 July this year, Ofgem has begun to assume that the average household uses less energy than it used to. We’ve used the “old” assumptions about energy use to make the comparisons with previous years fair.

FactCheck verdict

Andy Burnham has promised to scrap VAT on electricity bills which the government says will save the average household £45 from October and “put more money in people’s pockets”.

But using like-for-like figures from Cornwall Insight and Ofgem, we calculate that the average bill would have risen by £94 anyway between October 2025 and October 2026.

So even with the cut to VAT on electricity, we expect the average home will pay £49 more on energy from this October than it would have done last year.

The government was contacted for comment.

As FactCheck previously reported, the dispute over the money led the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to launch an investigation in May into why the Reform UK leader didn’t declare the sum.

And further reporting from the Sunday Times this weekend raised questions about his relationship with convicted fraudster George Cottrell.

After saying he has “done no wrong”, Mr Farage has now announced he will resign as Clacton MP and run again in order to allow his constituents to “be the judges of his actions”.

Why did Nigel Farage resign as Reform leader?

Nigel Farage has been asked on multiple occasions about the nature of the £5 million given to him by Christopher Harborne in April 2024 – a few months before Mr Farage was elected as an MP.

Mr Harborne, a cryptocurrency investor and Reform’s biggest financial backer, told The Telegraph in April 2026 that he gave the money to Mr Farage “because of my great admiration for the decades of work he had done to achieve Brexit”.

Mr Farage said at the end of April that it was a gift for his personal security so that he “would be safe and secure for the rest of my life” and on 14 May he told The Sun it was “given as a reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years”.

Further questions surrounding this money were then raised when Sky News revealed in May that Mr Farage bought a £1.4m house shortly after receiving the money from Mr Harborne.

Land registry documents seen by the BBC showed that Mr Farage completed on the property in Surrey on 10 May 2024. The same documents show that the purchase was made in cash with no mortgage.

In a statement to Sky in May, a spokesperson for Reform said: “The relevant chronology is straightforward. The offer and purchase process for the property commenced before the gift.

“Mr Farage had already passed proof of funds and the relevant checks before receiving the gift. The purchase was therefore already proceeding independently of it.”

Ultimately, it’s impossible to prove where the money for the property came from as it was a cash purchase, as the documents show.

The Sunday Times then reported over the weekend that Mr Farage did not declare benefits received from his long-time ally, George Cottrell. Other parties were then calling for this to also be investigated by the standards commissioner, which Mr Farage said in his resignation speech that it will be.

On Tuesday, Mr Farage stepped down to trigger a by-election, saying that he will be putting his name forward to stand in the by-election because “the people of Clacton” – his constituency – “should be the judges of my actions”.

He said that the Sunday Times report is “wholly inaccurate” and that the parliamentary standards commissioner was being used as a “political tool”.

Mr Farage vowed to “fight to win” in the by-election and “to continue the political revolution that Reform has started”.

Why was an investigation into the £5m launched?

The Conservative Party wrote to Parliament’s standards watchdog about the £5 million given to Mr Farage and on 13 May, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner launched an inquiry.

He is being investigated under rule 5 of the House of Commons code of conduct – “failure to register an interest”.

This makes various demands of MPs, including that “new MPs must register all their current financial interests, and any registrable benefits (other than earnings) received in the 12 months before their election within one month of their election”.

The £5 million payment did not appear on Mr Farage’s declaration of interests and only became public knowledge after first being reported by The Guardian in April.

But his opponents have argued he should have declared it in the MPs’ register of interests when he was elected to Parliament in 2024.

A spokesman for Reform said in May that Mr Farage has “always been clear that this was a personal, unconditional gift and no rules were broken”.

MPs are allowed to accept gifts from donors, but they are meant to declare these, as well as any other financial interests that “might reasonably be thought to influence their actions, speeches or votes in parliament,” according to the Institute for Government.

Mr Farage said to the BBC on 23 June that the money was an “unconditional gift” and when asked if and how he had spent the money, he said it was “not the public’s business”.

Punishments for breaking the code range from a written or oral apology to suspension from the House – or even expulsion in the most serious cases.

The investigation outcome usually depends on whether the failure was deemed to be deliberate or inadvertent, but a long-enough suspension would trigger a recall petition.

There’s no current deadline for this investigation and it’s unknown how long it could take to be completed. The investigation will be paused whilst the by-election takes place. If Mr Farage returns to parliament after the contest, it is expected to start again.

And the latest figures, from December 2025, show that the service as a whole is still running at 110 per cent of its capacity, with individual units again seeing even higher workloads.

Our findings raise questions about how the service will manage as more prisoners are set to be released early under a new law.

The probation officers’ union says this policy is expected to put further strain on officers who are “already struggling”, and that the union is concerned about what it means for public protection.

FactCheck lays out the exclusive data below.

Probation workloads

Probation officers meet with former prisoners to make sure they are following certain rules, not committing further offences, and in some cases, engaging in rehabilitation programmes. 

New government legislation will see many prisoners released into the community early over the coming year, in order to free up space in the prison system. The government projects that without such reforms, demand for prison places would outstrip supply by 9,500 in 2028 – even after new prisons have been built.

But Napo, the probation officers’ union, has been warning that its officers are already overwhelmed – and that these new releases will add to their caseloads.

We’ve obtained data under the Freedom of Information Act which shows for the first time the workload faced by probation officers in every single probation unit in the country over the past five years.

If a probation unit is operating at 100 per cent capacity, that means the average officer in that unit has a full workload. Anything above 100 per cent means the average officer has more work to do than hours in which to do it.

For example, if a unit is operating at 120 per cent capacity, that means the average officer in that unit has twelve hours’ worth of work to do for every ten hours they are actually working.

The worst period

Our findings reveal that during its worst period in early 2023, nine out of ten units in the country were operating at over 100 per cent capacity.

At that time, the probation service overall was operating at 122 per cent of its capacity.

And we’ve identified individual units which were far, far worse than the average.

Essex North spent many months running at over 150 per cent capacity, peaking at 169 per cent capacity in March 2023.

Brent hit a peak of 172 per cent in June 2023.

And Surrey hit a similar high of 171 per cent the previous September.

And many other units around this period were at over 150 per cent too.

Probation reset

In 2024, the Conservative government introduced a policy called “probation reset” in order to reduce workloads.

The policy said that probation officers no longer had to meet with low risk cases once they were two thirds of the way through their licence period.

Workloads did fall after this policy was introduced – but they have since begun to creep up again. In our chart below we’ve highlighted the changing average, plus some of our example units, so you can see for yourself.

Everything above the dotted line is more than a full workload.

Latest figures

As of December 2025, the probation service as a whole across England and Wales was again running at 110 per cent capacity.

And yet again, we can see particular black spots. The newly established Mid Kent unit was at 171 per cent in the latest figures.

And Oxfordshire was at 161 per cent – though the Ministry of Justice has said this was due to “an isolated incident”.

The probation service is going to have to cope with even more prisoners as the new legislation comes into effect in the coming months.

Napo, the probation officer union, told FactCheck: “These changes are significant and will introduce another huge amount of work for our members that are already struggling.

“We are concerned about public protection because our members are firefighting every day, and that means corners get cut, things get missed, and there isn’t that attention to detail that’s required for really robust public protection.” 

A government spokesperson told FactCheck: “We are strengthening probation and community services, boosting capacity through a record £700 million investment by 2028 and the recruitment of 1,300 extra probation officers. The rollout of the latest technology which will save thousands of days of admin work every year – so probation officers can spend more time on the vital work of cutting reoffending.”

After years of argument and negotiations the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020, on the eve of the Covid 19 pandemic.

Ten years since the vote, FactCheck looks at some of the main pledges of both campaigns and where the UK is today.

Immigration

The pledge to gain control over immigration was at the heart of the Brexit campaign.

Writing in The Times two months before the vote in 2016, key Brexit campaigner and then Justice Secretary Michael Gove said: “Because we cannot control our borders…. public services such as the NHS will face an unquantifiable strain as millions more become EU citizens.”

In the year ending March 2016, the number of people entering the UK was 803,000 according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Of those, 294,000 were from the EU according to The Migration Observatory.

Since 2016 the number of people coming from the EU has declined.

However, for those who are entering from non-EU countries there has been a large uptick. This increase started in early 2021, when a new post-Brexit immigration system was introduced.

The peak of non-EU migration came in the year ending March 2023 when arrivals hit nearly 1.5 million. But since 2023 immigration has been on a downward trajectory according to the ONS.

For the year ending December 2025, the latest provisional ONS figures, immigration was 813,000 – including those from EU member states plus those from outside the trade bloc.

So far, we’ve only looked at immigration – people coming into Britain. But what about net migration – that is, those coming minus those leaving?

Net migration hit a high of 944,000 in the year to September 2023. Since then this figure has been declining. The latest available figure from the ONS has net migration for the year to December 2025 the number as 171,000. 627,000  came from non-EU counties while 76,000 came from the EU. In 2025 642,000 people left the UK.

And just looking at EU movement, the latest ONS data shows that 42,000 more EU citizens left the UK than arrived in the year ending December 2025.

While both the vote to leave and our actual exit from the EU seemed to reduce the number of people coming from the EU, this number was outweighed by those entering from non-EU countries. Since leaving the EU the UK has been able to exercise more control over immigration – and different governments have chosen to use that power differently.

So if you voted to leave to bring down immigration, you might have been disappointed. But if you wanted to give UK governments more control of immigration, your wish was granted.

Trade

The Leave campaign said that Brexit would make the UK “free to trade with the whole world”.  The UK has made 40 trade agreements with 74 countries and territories around the world plus the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement since Brexit.

According to a London School of Economics (LSE) study, trade between the UK and EU dropped by between 17 and 19 per cent in both directions in the post-referendum period and before the UK had signed a deal with the EU.

However, there is a potential benefit to UK trade from Brexit: it meant we avoided the worst of Donald Trump’s trade tariffs compared to our continental neighbours.

Professor Thomas Sampson, who is an international trade expert at the LSE said in a blog post:  “being outside the EU means the UK is now facing a lower tariff on its exports to the US and it’s not unreasonable to point to that as a consequence of Brexit.”

There are some aspects of the UK’s trading relationship with the EU which are yet to be fully ironed out, such as Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) products. SPS products include everyday items such as fresh sausages and burgers, certain types of shellfish, and seed potatoes.

In March 2026, the government announced a new deal for SPS products. This deal is the latest example of how the Labour government has become more aligned with the EU. In May 2025 at a UK-EU “reset” summit, the pair agreed to “deeper cooperation” with each other.

In August 2025, the British Chambers of Commerce reported that “nearly half of businesses exporting services cite red tape and market access issues as key barriers post-Brexit” . One academic paper by the LSE says that “The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) [which is the deal between the UK and EU agreeing their future trading relationship] reduced total goods exports from the UK by an estimated £27bn (or 6.4 per cent) in 2022 – due to a 13.2 per cent fall in the value of goods exported to the EU.”

Logistics UK, which represents the UK haulage industry, said in 2025: “Between 2017 and 2024, total exports [of physical goods] to the EU fell by 23 per cent…. while imports from the EU declined only by 5 per cent. This suggests UK exporters have faced greater frictions post-Brexit, while imports have been more resilient.”

In relation to services, for example banking, consulting, retail and cultural activities, UK exports have performed “strongly” since Brexit in 2020 according to a House of Commons briefing paper. The research paper says services exports to the EU were up 28 per cent in 2025 compared with 2019 levels. For non-EU countries, service exports were up 26 per cent.

Despite this growth in the services sector, experts from the LSE said in June 2025: “Overall, UK services exports are estimated to be 4 to 5 percent lower, indicating that five years on, Brexit has fallen short of delivering its vision of Global Britain”.

So while we might be exporting more services than we did before Brexit, these researchers conclude that we could be even better off if we hadn’t left the EU.

Northern Ireland

As this FactCheck article from 2017 explains, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has always been a complex issue. Prior to the Good Friday Agreement being signed in 1998 there had been periods of intense violence in Northern Ireland. The Troubles, as they were commonly known, were mainly relating to Northern Ireland’s place in the UK, a topic which Brexit drew into sharp focus.

On 29 February 2016, the then Mayor of London and prominent campaigner for Brexit, Boris Johnson told BBC News: “I think the situation will be absolutely unchanged” in relation to the Northern Ireland border with the Republic. When Johnson was prime minister, he told the Conservative Party Conference in 2019 that “we will under no circumstances have checks at or near the border in Northern Ireland. We will respect the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement.”

In 2017, Theresa May, who had by then entered No10, said “nobody wants to see a return to the borders of the past”.

So what actually happened?

From the end of January 2021 up until spring 2023, when Rishi Sunak brought in the Windsor Framework, if a company wanted to send goods between Northern Ireland (in the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (in the EU) they would have to have those goods manually checked, which required paperwork.

The Windsor Framework is an arrangement between the EU and the UK drawn up in order to smooth out the trading relationship for goods going to and from the UK and EU. The Framework removed barriers to goods traveling between Northern Ireland and the rest of the EU.

Since the Windsor Framework has come into force  the majority of goods do not require any checks or paperwork when moving goods between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

But it is important to note that there is still some level of additional paperwork relating to Brexit and trading in or around Northern Ireland. For example, when a business in England needs to send a parcel to another business in Northern Ireland, it must submit information to the Customs Declaration Service.

In 2026, there is no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Due to the unique position of Northern Ireland in the UK, Northern Ireland can trade freely with both the EU and the UK. People can cross the border in the same way which they could before Brexit. However, there are still some checks on some goods which are a direct result of Brexit.

Economy

On the Remain side, the Treasury released a report on “the immediate economic impact of leaving the EU” ahead of the 2016 referendum.

In the report, the then-chancellor, George Osborne said that “a vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy”, pushing the UK into recession and leading to “around 500,000” people losing their jobs.

It is worth noting that the Treasury report was written on the assumption that Article 50, the start of the formal process of leaving the EU, would be triggered as soon as the result was known.

But in the end, this did not happen straightaway – it was only triggered on 29 March 2017 by Theresa May. So it’s hard to know whether the lack of an instant recession following the vote disproves the Treasury analysis, or whether holding off on Article 50 helped mitigate the economic shock.

According to an academic paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled  “The Economic Impact of Brexit” the UK economy was approximately 8 per cent smaller in 2025 than it would have been if the UK had remained in the EU. The same study also says both employment and productivity are 3-4 per cent lower than they would have been, with business investment 12 to 18 per cent smaller.

A separate study by Warwick Business School found that between 2016 and 2019, a period when the UK was technically part of the EU but figuring out the best way to leave, around £22 billion of investment was lost to the EU. The study finds that this investment would have led to the creation of 100,000 jobs, many of which would have been in “high value” sectors such as banking and professional services.

Whilst the Remain campaign’s more pessimistic claims about immediate recession and mass job losses didn’t materialise, a number of prominent business surveys and academic papers have found that Brexit negatively affected the UK economy compared to staying in the EU.

For more analysis of how Brexit has affected the UK, you can watch our Foursight team’s YouTube documentary here. Kiran Moodley explores the impact of Brexit further and interviews one of the main architects of the Vote Leave campaign, Lord Elliott.

FactCheck takes a look.

What is a ‘gift’ in politics?

MPs are allowed to accept gifts from donors, but they are meant to declare these, as well as any other financial interests that “might reasonably be thought to influence their actions, speeches or votes in parliament,” according to the Institute for Government.

This could include things like travel tickets, meals, accommodation, clothing, club subscriptions and loans, amongst other items.

MPs can only receive gifts worth more than £500 if it’s from a “permissible source”, which includes individuals on a UK electoral register, UK-registered companies and some UK-registered organisations.

They have to declare any gifts or benefits above £300 in value if they are received in their capacity as an MP and they must also register any gift received by third parties if it was given because of their MP status.

The name and address of the donor, the value of the gift, and the dates of receipt and acceptance must be registered in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests within 28 days of receiving it.

Was the £5m given to Nigel Farage a gift – and did he buy his million pound house with it?

Reform Party leader Nigel Farage has been asked on multiple occasions about the nature of the £5m – given to him before the 2024 election – and each time he has said that the money was a “gift” to pay for his personal security.

But the reason behind this gifting became confused recently when Mr Harborne, a cryptocurrency investor and Reform’s biggest financial backer, told The Telegraph in April that he gave the money to Mr Farage “because of my great admiration for the decades of work he had done to achieve Brexit”.

Further questions surrounding this money were raised when Sky News revealed last week that Mr Farage bought a £1.4m house shortly after receiving the money from Mr Harborne.

Land registry documents seen by the BBC showed that Mr Farage completed on the property in Surrey on 10 May 2024.

The same documents show that the purchase was made in cash with no mortgage.

But in a statement to Sky, a spokesperson for Reform said: “The relevant chronology is straightforward. The offer and purchase process for the property commenced before the gift.

“Mr Farage had already passed proof of funds and the relevant checks before receiving the gift. The purchase was therefore already proceeding independently of it.”

In the same week, Reform told the BBC that the money for the house came from Mr Farage’s stint on reality TV show ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ in December 2023, when the Reform leader came third in the show and was reportedly paid a seven-figure sum.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to prove where the money for the property came from as it was a cash purchase, as the documents show.

Why is this money being investigated – and what happens next?

The Conservative Party recently wrote to Parliament’s standards watchdog about the £5m given to Mr Farage and on 13 May, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner launched an inquiry.

He is being investigated under rule 5 of the House of Commons code of conduct – failure to register an interest.

There are numerous requirements which fall under this, including that “new MPs must register all their current financial interests, and any registrable benefits (other than earnings) received in the 12 months before their election within one month of their election”.

The £5m payment did not appear on Mr Farage’s declaration of interests and only became public knowledge after first being reported by The Guardian in April.

Mr Farage said he was under “no obligation” to declare the gift because it had been given before he was an MP, but his opponents have argued he should have declared it in the MPs’ register of interests when he was elected to Parliament in 2024.

A spokesman for Reform said: “Mr Farage’s office is in communications with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

“He has always been clear that this was a personal, unconditional gift and no rules were broken. We look forward to this being put to bed once and for all.”

Punishments for breaking the code range from a written or oral apology to suspension from the House – or even expulsion in the most serious cases.

The investigation outcome usually depends on whether the failure was deemed to be deliberate or inadvertent. There’s no current timeline for how long this investigation could take.

The Conservatives also raised concerns about the £5m gift with the Electoral Commission, which said it was considering the information, but there’s been no update on this as of yet.

We’re with a private investigator searching for a 26-plate BMW, worth around £60,000 new, taken from outside a home in London four days previously.

Investigator Rob is being guided in real time by colleagues who are following pings sent from a security device within the car. The trail leads us to a rural industrial unit, where Rob finds the BMW, or at least what’s left of it.

The engine sits on a pallet. Its door rests against a stack of wheels. There are parts of various cars everywhere.

The team calls in the police and Rob shows them what he’s found. A 31-year-old man is later charged with offences including conspiring to receive stolen goods.

But with a vehicle reported to police as stolen every four minutes across England and Wales, it won’t be long until their next hunt begins.

‘Huge criminal enterprise’

According to exclusive data we’ve obtained, thieves are targeting anything on wheels: ambulances, double-decker buses and even hearses. If it moves they’re stealing it.

And most of the crimes go unsolved, with just a fraction of vehicle theft cases resulting in a suspect being charged.

Channel 4 News has been following the work of W4G Track Recovery, one of a number of companies which use tracker technology and investigative techniques to find missing or stolen vehicles for their clients.

Director Ahron Tolley said his team aims to complement, rather than replace, the police.

He said it was often “an incredible amount of work” to trace a stolen car.

He said: “The vehicle crime stats are exploding and unfortunately the resources that the police have are finite.”

Ahron said the criminal networks behind the thefts are often highly organised.

“Car crime has moved on from being something where a car’s stolen, it’s driven around in circles for a bit of joyriding and then left,” he said.

“There’s a huge criminal enterprise behind it now that’s worth millions of pounds globally.”

Police solving fewer vehicle thefts

There were 119,000 offences of vehicle theft or aggravated vehicle-taking recorded by police across England and Wales in 2025, a 47% rise in a decade, official crime stats show.

And figures obtained from the Home Office by Channel 4 News show just how few investigations result in court action.

In the year to March 2016, the oldest comparable data available, 9 per cent of police-recorded vehicle thefts saw a suspect charged by the end of that year.

By the year ending March 2025, this had fallen to just 2.9%.

Separate information we’ve obtained shows that in the five years to December 2025, the DVLA recorded nearly half a million vehicles stolen across the UK, including:

• 112 mobility vehicles
• 70 ambulances
• 16 street cleaners
• Nine double-decker buses
• Four hearses
• And one fire engine

Assistant Chief Constable Sarah Grahame leads on vehicle crime for the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

She told us: “Criminals are increasingly sophisticated and this presents challenges, but we are fully committed to tackling the issue from all angles.”

Working with partner organisations allowed them to “focus resources on the offenders causing the most harm, sharing intelligence and doing all we can to disrupt the often highly organised criminals involved”.

Image credit: Essex Police/Channel 4 News

FactCheck looks at the two main areas in which Cardiff has the most power – taxes and the economy, and the NHS.

Labour

On tax and the economy one of Labour’s key manifesto promises is to not raise the rate of  income tax over the next term of the Senedd, which will run until 2030.

The NHS is controlled by the devolved governments. Labour wants to invest £4 billion to build “state-of-the-art new hospitals” including a major development in West Wales.

Looking at the manifesto as a whole, the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think tank says “it is clear that fully delivering on Welsh Labour’s various ambitions for the spending side of the budget would require substantial additional expenditure.” It notes that given the current state of the Welsh finances the party would “almost certainly require cuts to spending on some other services” in order to fund its manifesto commitments.

A spokesperson for the party told FactCheck: “Welsh Labour is the only party to have published full costings for its manifesto, clear for everyone to see. What we’ll spend, what we won’t, and how we’ll pay for it.”

Plaid Cymru

On tax and the economy Plaid is pledging to make council tax “fairer” as well as to “reform and rebalance business rates”. The party says it will look at how the Land Transaction Tax “can be reformed to better support first-time buyers”. Plaid will also be lobbying Westminster to devolve more powers to Cardiff so that it can “introduce a Vacant Land Tax and to set made-in-Wales income tax bands”.

In regard to health and social care Plaid says it “has a costed and targeted plan to cut waiting lists, as a first and necessary step to transforming our health and care services”.

The IFS says in its independent analysis that Plaid Cymru “do[es] not appear to have faced up to the fiscal reality facing the next Welsh Government. And if the party knows how it would afford its pledges, it has omitted to explain how in its manifesto.”

When asked to respond Plaid Cymru told FactCheck: “As confirmed by Professor Gerald Holtham – one of Wales’s foremost economists – our plans are detailed, carefully costed and achievable within the financial envelope we know will be available to the Welsh Government over the next Senedd term.”

Reform UK

Reform UK promises to cut 1p off all bands of income tax by the end of its term in power. The party also pledged to “not introduce any new Welsh controlled tax or levy.”  Like the Welsh Conservatives, Reform UK says that if a council wants to increase council tax by more than 4.99 per cent, it will require a referendum.

Reform UK has a 20 point list of what it aims to do with the NHS and health and social care. These range from “implement[ing] a strategy to cut the waiting lists” and a “workforce sustainability strategy” to “dentistry reform” and “remov[ing] ideology from the NHS”.

The IFS says that lower taxes are possible in Wales but “significant efficiencies likely required to maintain services even with existing funding, tax cuts would likely necessitate cuts in at least some services used by households”.

We approached Reform UK for comment.

Greens

The Welsh Greens promise to “scrap council tax” and replace it with a Land Value Tax (LVT). This would mean that the amount of tax a household pays depends on the value of their land. The IFS says: “ Few details are provided on the structure of these taxes, nor whether the Green Party would plan for these taxes to raise less, the same, or more than the current council tax and business rates systems.”

The experts from the IFS say that the Greens’ plans for a “fundamental shift in how health is understood, funded and delivered” would “require big increases in both investment and day-to-day spending, not only in the health service […] at the very least, in the order of hundreds of millions of pounds per year”

On a wider scale the IFS says that the Greens’ plan to pay for an enlarged state is lacking, adding that “in the context of a Welsh budget already under significant strain, paying for these new entitlements would require either substantial tax rises or significant cuts to other areas of Welsh Government spending.”

Responding to the IFS the Greens told us: “We have costed our key manifesto pledges which are marginal in terms of the total Welsh budget”. The spokesperson told FactCheck: “to realise our full ambition for the people of Wales we will need to push strongly and urgently for a fair deal from Westminster.”

Conservatives

The Conservatives’ big pledge on tax and the economy is to “cut the basic rate of income tax by 1p”.

On the NHS and social care the Welsh Conservatives are promising to “Increase spending on health and social care in real terms in each and every year of the next Senedd term”. They also want to set up an NHS Wales “Efficiency Taskforce to drive out waste and deliver better value for money”.

Overall, the IFS concluded that “the proposed combination of tax cuts and spending increases could be paid for without significant cutbacks in at least some Welsh Government services”.

The Welsh Conservatives told FactCheck:“Our proposals are fully funded through a combination of efficiency savings, including a 1.15 per cent drive across most departments”

Liberal Democrats

On the economy the party promises to make it easier to access capital to improve small businesses, invest in renewable energy to cut energy bills and setting up an “a dedicated Welsh Industrial Strategy” to help with entrepreneurship and innovation.

With regards to the NHS and healthcare, the Lib Dems are pledging to “end corridor care”. They want to “introduce a guarantee for 100 per cent of patients to start treatment for cancer within 62 days from urgent referral as part of a National Cancer Plan for Wales”.

The IFS has not written a full analysis of the Welsh Liberal Democrat’s manifesto, however, in a wider piece about the elections in Wales, the think tank wrote: “The Liberal Democrats do raise the possibility of a 1 percentage point increase in income tax rates as an emergency measure to help improve social care services.”

A Welsh Liberal Democrat Spokesperson said: “The cost of doing nothing is written across Wales. Parents pushed out of work, pay packets shrinking, child poverty rising. That is the real bill, and it keeps growing.”

We’ve spoken to some of Britain’s leading constitutional experts.

Why did the assisted dying bill fail?

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill – more often referred to as the “assisted dying bill” – aimed to allow adults with less than six months to live to “request and be provided with assistance to end their own life”, “subject to safeguards and protections”.

Bills have to pass through the Houses of Commons and Lords in order to become law. The assisted dying bill has been stuck in the Lords for months as peers proposed hundreds of amendments.

The bill has run out of time as we’re now at the end of the parliamentary session, which usually runs for about 12 months and ends in late spring or early summer.

Any bill that’s still making its way through Parliament at the end of the session will be dropped by default.

Governments normally rescue some of their own partially-complete bills at this point and allow them to carry through to the next session without losing their progress.

But as assisted dying is a private members’ bill – brought forward by an individual backbench MP rather than the government – it’s not eligible for that protection.

Has the House of Lords gone beyond its powers?

Supporters of the bill say the hundreds of Lords amendments were designed to destroy the chances of passing legislation in time, while critics argue significant changes would be needed to ensure proper safeguards for vulnerable people.

Campaigners also point to the fact that the elected House of Commons has voted in favour of the legislation. In that context, is it constitutional for the Lords to introduce so many amendments?

We spoke to Jo Murkens, Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, who told FactCheck that the bill’s failure “is constitutionally orthodox, even if politically contentious”.

There are circumstances where the Lords, as the unelected chamber of Parliament, is required to accept the decision of the Commons – for example, when the bill in question is from the government or enacting a manifesto commitment.

But as Professor Murkens explained, “none of the conventions that normally restrain the House of Lords apply here”. Enacting assisted dying was not in Labour’s manifesto, and this bill was brought by an individual backbencher, Kim Leadbeater, not the government.

“In those circumstances,” Professor Murkens told us, “the House of Lords is entitled to subject the proposal to sustained scrutiny, even where that has the practical effect of preventing passage.”

Professor Robert Hazell of University College London’s Constitution Unit agrees that “the failure of the bill was not unconstitutional”.

Is the collapse of the bill undemocratic?

We spoke to constitutional expert Professor Sir Vernon Bogdanor of King’s College London and the University of Oxford. He told FactCheck: “The Lords would say that they have not rejected the bill, but [were] performing their function as a revising chamber.”

Professor Bogdanor points to “medical experts in the Lords” who believe the bill “needs, at the very least, amendment”. He notes that “supporters of assisted dying say that this is an excuse for rejection” and that peers who may want to reject rather than revise the bill slowed down the Lords process with “much longer” speeches.

He points out that “some would say” the fact there was a free vote on the issue in the Commons gives the MPs’ decision “greater weight since [they] were voting as they thought right, and not because of a party whip.”

Though he adds “others would say that the Parliament Acts [which might support the idea that the Lords should step back] were intended to apply only to government bills foreshadowed in a party manifesto.”

Professor Hazell – who was a director of the assisted dying campaign organisation Dignity and Choice in Dying from 2016 to 2018 – told FactCheck the bill’s failure is “undemocratic”.

He explains his view: “The bill was passed by the House of Commons after serious discussion of the underlying principles and necessary safeguards […] only to be effectively blocked in the Lords by a group of seven peers who moved most of the 1,200 amendments.”

Professor Murkens has a different position.

“Characterising this outcome as ‘undemocratic’ depends on adopting a narrowly majoritarian view of democracy: ‘whatever the elected House of Commons decides should become law’.” (Majoritarian democracy is the idea that the person or issue with a majority of votes behind it carries the day.)

“But,” Professor Murkens continues, “that understanding neither conforms to the UK’s understanding of the constitution or of democracy. The unelected House of Lords is expected to act as a revising and deliberative chamber, and as a constitutional watchdog, if you like, particularly on morally complex questions that Parliament itself treats as matters of conscience rather than popular mandate.”

Could assisted dying still become law?

In order to have a chance of becoming law, the assisted dying bill would have to be proposed again in the next session and start the lengthy process in the Commons and the Lords from scratch.

In theory the government could revive the bill when Parliament reconvenes by reintroducing the policy in a government-proposed bill. But as it’s highly contentious and a matter of conscience, this is unlikely.

Or it could be proposed again as a private members’ bill, but that’s far from straightforward. Private members’ bills are drawn up by individual MPs and have to win a “ballot” of other such bills in order to get parliamentary time.

Assisted dying campaigners say they are looking at using the Parliament Act to bring the bill forward again.

FactCheck verdict

The assisted dying bill has failed after spending months in the House of Lords. Leading experts we spoke to explained that this was entirely in the scope of the Lords’ powers under the constitution. Opinions differ on whether the outcome was democratic.

Update: 28 April 2026

This article has been amended to make clear that Professor Hazell was, between 2016 and 2018, a director of Campaign for Dignity in Dying, which campaigns to make assisted dying legal.

On Monday, Starmer was grilled by MPs on the topic – but his answers raise further questions.

Let’s take a look.

Did Starmer mislead the House of Commons on 4 February?

Kemi Badenoch asked the Prime Minister on 4 February this year whether “the official security vetting that he received” mentioned Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer replied: “Yes, it did”.

As we reported last week, that would have left MPs with the impression that he had received the security vetting in some form by that date.

But that’s hard to square with the government’s assertion that the Prime Minister only found out on 14 April that Foreign Office officials had granted Mandelson security clearance against advice from UK Security Vetting (UKSV).

How could he have known in February what was in the security vetting if he didn’t find out about UKSV’s recommendation until April?

This issue reared up again on Monday.

Veteran Conservative Sir Desmond Swayne asked: “What on earth was it that the Prime Minister received and was talking about that [Badenoch] referred to as the official security vetting? He said that he had received it.”

Starmer replied, appearing to correct Swayne: “The due diligence report.”

But as we reported last week, MPs would have assumed on 4 February that Starmer’s answer referred to the security vetting, not the due diligence report.

After all, Starmer had been careful just moments before to differentiate between “the due diligence exercise” and the “security vetting by the security services”. And Badenoch’s question was explicitly about “the official security vetting he received”. The Prime Minister did not correct her or point out that he hadn’t received the security vetting.

So it seems Starmer may have misled the House twice, even if unintentionally. First, on 4 February by giving MPs the impression that he had knowledge of the contents of security vetting when he now says he didn’t – and even says that his answer referred to something else. Second, on Monday, when he denied having misled the House on 4 February.

And the Prime Minister’s attempt to square this circle raises further questions…

Due diligence versus security vetting

An important aspect of this row is the difference between the “due diligence” process – when the Cabinet Office looked at reputational risks of appointing Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington – and the “developed vetting” security checks conducted by UKSV on behalf of the Foreign Office. The latter involves looking into someone’s personal and financial life to see if there’s anything that could make them vulnerable to blackmail or bribery.

The Prime Minister accepts that he saw the due diligence report before appointing Mandelson at the end of 2024. (Though he says Mandelson lied to No10 about the extent of his relationship with Epstein, which Mandelson denies.)

What’s emerged in the last week relates to the security vetting. The Guardian reported on Thursday that UKSV had advised against awarding Mandelson developed vetting security clearance, and that senior Foreign Office officials had granted it anyway without telling ministers.

(The now-sacked permanent secretary at the Foreign Office Sir Olly Robbins has since told MPs that he couldn’t share the UKSV recommendation due to confidentiality – and that he understood that UKSV considered Mandelson’s a “borderline” case but was “leaning towards” recommending clearance be blocked. The government insists there was nothing preventing Robbins sharing the UKSV conclusions with ministers.)

Starmer has pointed out the difference between due diligence and security vetting himself.

On Monday, he said: “There were two different processes. One was the due diligence process carried out by the Cabinet Office, in which Peter Mandelson was asked questions. Separately, there was the developed vetting process in which the recommendation of UKSV was not shared with me until Tuesday evening.”

The civil service acknowledges that these are two separate processes too. The then-Cabinet Secretary wrote to the Prime Minister in a private memo in 2024 that officials would “develop a plan for [an ambassadorial appointee] to acquire the necessary security clearances and do due diligence on any potential Conflicts of Interest”.

This makes the Prime Minister’s apparent explanation for his remarks in February all the more confusing.

Asked on Monday by Conservative MP Gregory Stafford about his 4 February comment, Starmer said: “I was asked about the vetting process, and the due diligence is part of the vetting process”.

But that’s not quite correct – he was asked specifically about the security vetting on 4 February. And that, as the Prime Minister, government and officials have stated throughout this row, is distinct from the due diligence exercise.

FactCheck verdict

Keir Starmer gave an answer to the House of Commons on 4 February that would have left MPs with the impression that he had received Peter Mandelson’s security vetting in some form.

This appears at odds with the government’s current position that the Prime Minister only found out in April that the security vetting agency had recommended against granting Mandelson clearance.

Starmer said on Monday that his comment had in fact referred to the “due diligence exercise” carried out by the Cabinet Office.

But if that’s what he meant on 4 February, MPs would have had no way of knowing it. His answer was in response to a question about “the official security vetting” – and moments before, he’d clearly delineated between security vetting and due diligence.

He was asked about this comment on Monday and denied having misled the House, but gave an explanation that doesn’t support his denial.

So it seems the Prime Minister may have misled the House of Commons twice, even if unintentionally: once on 4 February and again on 20 April, when he denied having misled Parliament on 4 February.

No10 pointed us to the Prime Minister’s comments on Monday in response to our questions: “I did not mislead the House of Commons. I accept that information that I should have had, and that the House should have had, should have been before the House, but I did not mislead the House, and that is why I have set out the account in full.”

The Guardian reported on Thursday that the former Labour bigwig had failed security vetting in January 2025, but the Foreign Office granted him approval anyway.

Downing Street issued a statement last night insisting that it was civil servants, not ministers, who took the decision – and that crucially, no minister including the Prime Minister knew about it until Tuesday this week.

But we’ve been looking at comments Starmer made that raise questions about the government’s current position and whether the Prime Minister might have misled parliament – even inadvertently.

On 4 February this year, Kemi Badenoch asked Starmer in the House of Commons: “Did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?” The Prime Minister replied: “Yes, it did”.

This suggests Starmer wasn’t just told by the Foreign Office that Mandelson had been granted clearance but that he was aware of the results of the vetting  process, or at least some of the detail, at the time he was speaking to MPs in early February.

If that’s the case, it’s difficult to see how he didn’t know until this week that Foreign Office officials had overruled the vetting service advice.

Alternatively, it’s possible the Prime Minister was referring to the “due diligence exercise” looking into Peter Mandelson that the Cabinet Office conducted separate to the security service vetting process.

But if that is what Starmer meant, that would not have been clear to MPs in parliament on 4 February. In a previous answer moments before, the Prime Minister stressed the difference between the “due diligence exercise” and the “security vetting”.

When Badenoch followed up with her question about “the official security vetting”, MPs could only assume that this is what Starmer’s “yes” referred to.

If the Prime Minister did misspeak, he may have inadvertently misled parliament. In that case, he’d have to correct the record as soon as possible. He is due to address MPs on Monday (parliament doesn’t sit on Fridays) though we don’t know what he intends to say.

We approached No10 ahead of publication. It did not directly address our questions about the Prime Minister’s comment on 4 February. Separately, Starmer said today that the fact he “wasn’t told [Mandelson] had failed security vetting when I was telling parliament that due progress had been followed is unforgivable”.

Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, was asked on the Today programme this morning whether Starmer had inadvertently misled MPs. He replied: “No, because the Prime Minister was very clear that due process was followed. The fact that due process involved the right for the Foreign Office to ignore the recommendation of the security and vetting team is astonishing, but it was the established process.”

The most senior Foreign Office official, Olly Robbins, was sacked last night over the row.

The government has announced changes to the interest owed on some student loans in England and Wales.

From 1 September 2026, there will be a cap of 6 per cent on Plan 2 and Plan 3 loans, as well as for those starting university in the 2026/27 academic year.

Here’s what we know.

Who will this affect?

These changes will affect those on Plan 2 and Plan 3 who are in the process of repaying their university tuition fee and maintenance loans. This change will also apply to those starting university in September 2026.

Plan 2 loans apply to those who started university on or after 1 September 2012 up to July 2023. Plan 3 applies to postgraduate and doctoral loans, which were introduced in 2018.

What’s new and what has it replaced?

Under the current system, interest is added to the debt every year. The exact rate changes at the start of September each year, based on the rate of inflation as measured by the Retail Price Index (RPI) as it was in the previous March, with a further 3 per cent added on top.

Given the conflict in the Middle East, inflation is expected to rise significantly in the coming months. Without government action, graduates would have seen their loan balances swell.

Instead, from the start of September 2026, graduates will repay their loans at an interest rate of  6 per cent or RPI plus 3 per cent, whichever is lower.

Why is the government doing this now?

The government has pointed to the war in the Middle East as a justification for acting now. It is widely expected that the complex situation surrounding the US-Israeli conflict with Iran will drive up inflation and, therefore, increase the interest rates graduates pay on their loans.

What has actually changed?

Plan 2 and 3 graduates will still repay 9 per cent over their annual earnings above £29,900 and £21,000 respectively. So this announcement won’t change the amount borrowers are paying back each month.

But the new cap should prevent the total debt from growing by more than 6 per cent per year. That should mean that the time it takes to pay off the loan won’t grow quite as fast as it would have done without a cap.

What is the government saying?

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Baroness Jacqui Smith, the Minister for Skills, said: “Capping the maximum interest rate on Plan 2 and Plan 3 student loans will provide immediate protection for borrowers,” adding, “we’re acting now to defend against the consequences of far-away conflicts in an uncertain world.”

Amira Campbell, President of the National Union of Students (NUS), told FactCheck: “This government has woken up to the unfairness of student loans and is taking action to prevent our debts from spiralling further out of control.” She added: “This is a huge win for the over five million people on Plan 2 loans, the National Union of Students, and students’ unions across the country.”

However, the NUS wants the government to go further: “We still need to see the Chancellor stick to the terms we signed up to at 17 years old and raise the threshold in line with our incomes. The government has said it will look into the unfairness of the student loan system, and we will continue to hold them to that.”

This latest six day strike by resident doctors in England will finish on 13 April.

This walkout is the fifteenth round of industrial action taken by the doctors union the British Medical Association (BMA). The BMA’s dispute with the government started in September 2024.

Here’s what we know.

How long is this strike?

The strike began at 7am on 7 April and will end at 6:59am on 13 April.

Who is on strike?

Some members of the BMA who are resident doctors are participating in the strike, though we don’t yet know how many are taking part.

Resident doctors, who were known previously as junior doctors, make up roughly half of the doctors who are working in the NHS in England. There are 79,000 resident doctors working across NHS England. Only some of them are on strike this week.

The term “resident doctors” covers doctors in their first training years all the way to specialised registrars who have not reached consultant level.

Why are resident doctors striking?

Pay is the main reason for the walkout. At the end of March 2026 the BMA rejected a government offer of a 3.5 per cent pay rise saying that it “at best, barely treads water”.

Resident doctors are paid between £38,831 and £73,992 depending on their level according to NHS Careers.

The BMA is arguing that pay, when inflation is taken into account, has gone down 21 per cent compared to 2008/09.

In order to calculate the 21 per cent figure the BMA is using the Retail Price Index (RPI), to measure inflation. Using RPI has proven controversial as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is now commonly accepted as the headline inflation measure.

The BMA says that it uses RPI because it is the measure used to calculate interest rates on student loans.

According to a 2025 analysis by the health thinktank the Nuffield Trust, the difference between RPI and CPI is stark – “resident doctor pay has fallen by 4.7per cent since 2008 against CPI, but has decreased by 17.9 per cent over the same period when using RPI.”

There is also anger from the BMA  over the lack of specialist training places. At the end of 2025 the Health Secretary Wes Streeting offered to make 1,000 additional training places available in 2026 but withdrew that offer once the BMA made it clear that the strike was going ahead. The government said it had made it clear to the BMA that these training places were dependent upon the union not striking and the strikes meant it was “simply not operationally or financially possible to launch these posts in April in time to recruit for this year.”.

The union says that there are not enough training places to go around which is leading to long waiting lists for roles.

What will be affected?

According to an NHS briefing on the industrial action, hospitals are hoping to run on 95 per cent of normal activity.

The NHS says that it will be prioritising urgent elective surgery and cancer care with those waiting more than 62 days given priority.

The advice to patients is that unless you have been contacted to say that your appointment has been cancelled or rearranged, assume that it is going ahead.

999 and 111 services will not be affected, although NHS England is warning that patients with less urgent cases may have to wait longer at A&E.

What is the BMA saying?

Dr Jack Fletcher, the chair of the BMA’s Resident Doctors Committee said  “We have been negotiating in good faith for weeks to try and end the simultaneous pay and jobs crises for resident doctors. Frustratingly we had been making good progress right up until the point, in the last two weeks, when the Government began to shift the goalposts.”

What is the government saying?

In an open letter to the BMA the Health Secretary said: “Given that our two teams have worked so closely on crafting this latest detailed proposal over the last few months, BMA’s choice is even more disappointing to me, as well as staff and patients in the NHS: opting for very disruptive industrial action timed to impact on the holiday plans many staff will have made during the Easter break.”

While the world has been focused on the war in the Middle East, the full-scale war in Ukraine continues into its fifth year. The United States, with its Israeli allies, is continuing to bomb Iran, which is not only hurting the Iranian regime and the millions of people throughout the Middle East, but is also hurting the global economy.

One of the potential winners of the war is Russia. According to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, “Russia could net $3.3–$5bn in extra revenues by the end of March”.

Prior to its full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Putin’s Russia was a major exporter of oil, supplying much of mainland Europe. Since then, the amount of oil being exported has come down considerably. This was due to sanctions imposed mainly by America and Europe on Russian oil, in the hope that this would severely impact the Russian economy and therefore make it much harder for Putin to fund the war in Ukraine.

In January 2022, the EU imported 11.4 million tonnes of crude oil from Russia. As sanctions took hold that figure dropped to 1.7 million tonnes in January 2023, according to Trading Economics.

To compensate for not buying Russian petroleum oil, the EU increased its reliance on Libya, Kazakhstan, the US, and petroleum from Norway, according to official figures.

On 12 March 2026, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on X that he and the President are “providing a temporary authorisation to permit countries to purchase Russian oil currently stranded at sea”. This should provide a boost to the Russian economy, allowing it to take full advantage of the significant increase in the price of oil that the world has seen since the start of the US–Israeli war on Iran on 28 February. Before the conflict, the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil was around $55; throughout the conflict, the price of oil has regularly gone above the $100 per barrel mark.

The war and its repercussions have caused some countries to look elsewhere for their petrochemical demands. On a recent visit to Moscow, the Prime Minister of Vietnam, Pham Minh Chinh, “will sign important agreements to further boost cooperation in areas such as nuclear power, oil and gas cooperation”, a spokesman told reporters ahead of the trip.

China, which has taken up some of the slack from the EU in buying Russian energy, will pay around twice the price for crude oil compared to before the war in the Middle East began if the prices were based on the international market, according to Financial Times data.

However, in 2014 China signed a 30 year deal with Russia to supply them with natural gas, which includes a discount of up to 40 per cent of what the EU would pay.

The reason for the spike in the price of oil is that tankers cannot get in or out of the Persian Gulf. And major oil producers including United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain have been forced to halt or limit exports following retaliatory strikes by Iran.

At its narrowest, the Strait of Hormuz is a stretch of water which is 21 miles across and is the only way in or out of the Persian Gulf.

Professor Thijs Van De Graaf, from the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies at Ghent University in Belgium, told The Breakdown that the Strait of Hormuz is a “crucial artery to bring energy to the world economy”. The professor added that 20 per cent of global oil and liquid natural gas supplies come through the Strait.

Since the beginning of March, there have been around 100 vessels which have crossed the Strait of Hormuz; this compares to before the war, when 138 ships per day on average passed through the Strait, equating to twenty million barrels of crude oil and petroleum. There have been at least 17 incidents of damage on civilian ships in the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the conflict according to a Human Rights Watch report. These attacks, and the threat of further attacks from air strikes and sea mines, have made cargo ships very expensive to insure, or even uninsurable.

On 26 March Iran indicated that it will allow transit through the Strait of Hormuz for “friendly nations”. These nations are thought to be India, Pakistan, Iraq, China and Russia.

Together with the increased price of oil and gas, and the easing of sanctions by America, the Russian economy looks set to profit from the war in the Middle East.

A £53m fund was announced last week to help households that use heating oil to warm their homes and the new lower price cap for those using mains gas and electricity will come into place for three months in April.

A number of prominent political voices, including the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, have said that “drilling in the North Sea is the answer to the energy crisis”.

We’ve spoken to experts to find out more.

How much does the UK rely on North Sea oil?

The UK currently uses North Sea oil, but only from drilling operations that were already in place before the end of last year – and these will only continue for their natural lifespan.

This is because on 26 November 2025 the UK government announced there will be no new oil and gas exploration licenses, becoming the largest economy to officially take this step.

The UK currently has hundreds of active offshore and onshore oil and gas production sites. Dr Hafez Abdo, an associate professor of accounting at Nottingham University who examines the role of the oil and gas industry in supporting the transition to net zero, told us that domestic production meets approximately 40 per cent of the UK’s oil demand, “with the remainder primarily imported from Norway”.

He also said that additional supply requirements are met through imports from other countries, including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Kazakhstan.

Should new sites be used for more oil and gas production during the price surge?

FactCheck asked two experts if drilling for more oil in the North Sea would help the current energy price crisis caused by the US-Iran war.

The experts we spoke to told us that instead of opening up sites that have been closed, or drilling in new areas, it would be better to ramp up production in sites that are still active.

But why?

Dr Abdo told us that the UK should “prioritise accelerating production” from existing energy projects to “address potential short-term supply shortages”, as new drilling projects are “unlikely to provide immediate benefits” as they “typically require significant time before production begins”.

Drilling new areas would also be “ethically problematic,” he added, as it “contradicts” the UK’s net zero objectives and would therefore “undermine efforts to mitigate climate change risks and may slow the implementation of renewable energy initiatives”.
But Dr Abdo noted that drilling more in existing oil and gas sites during a price surge such as the one happening right now, would “just be a short-term solution”.

Would drilling active sites for more North Sea oil and gas bring energy prices down?

Drilling could be a short-term solution for providing more gas and oil, but it depends on the initiatives that the government takes – and the incentives they provide.

Dr Mark Ireland, a lecturer in energy geoscience at Newcastle University, told FactCheck that increased North Sea production “would be extremely unlikely to directly reduce energy prices”.

However, indirectly, the government revenues from the production “could be used to mitigate the volatility of the global market,” he said.

For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and both wholesale and retail energy prices rose, the government introduced a series of policies, including the windfall taxes on energy producers via the energy profits levy (EPL).

Dr Ireland explained that while the revenue from EPL “was not directly ring fenced and went into general taxation”, it can be seen “as part of the government balancing the books when it comes to packages of support to insulate the UK from price spikes”.

Therefore, if companies were “incentivised to bolster production in the North Sea”, then using the revenue from taxation “could be used to support consumers,” he added.

However, Dr Abdo noted that any potential contribution of these existing fields to start with depends on a number of factors.

These include the “production capacity of the sites, the incentives provided, and the political will of the UK government to pursue this option”.

Dr Abdo said managing the prices is “challenging” because oil and gas prices are “largely determined by international markets rather than local factors”.

He explained that extra drilling is “unlikely to have a significant impact” on prices due to the influence of these international markets, and the UK government currently being “unwilling to reduce taxes or duties on energy consumption”.

Dr Abdo also noted that the government could potentially influence costs through measures such as “modest reductions in fuel duties at the pump,” but said this is “unclear whether such action would be politically feasible”.

What would a longer-term solution be?

Both Dr Abdo and Dr Ireland told us they think the UK government making further investments in renewables is the best course to continue on, and one which would help with price surges due to unprecedented events, such as the US-Iran war, in the future.

Ms Badenoch also mentioned renewables in an article she wrote about North Sea drilling.

She said that drilling for North Sea oil to help with the energy crisis “doesn’t mean throwing all progress with renewables out the window”, but means “drilling in the North Sea and expanding other sources of generation too”.

“This is the only way we can protect families from rising bills, keep the cost of energy down for business, and control inflation,” the Conservative Party leader added.

FactCheck verdict

It’s been suggested, including from leader of the Conservatives Kemi Badenoch, that the UK government should be drilling for more oil in the North Sea to help with the energy price crisis caused by the US-Iran war.

FactCheck spoke to two experts in the field, Dr Hafez Abdo and Dr Mark Ireland, who both told us that although drilling in active sites in the North Sea would be a better short-term solution compared to drilling in new areas, this wouldn’t be that directly effective in bringing prices down for the consumer.

They said that the UK government should continue its investment in renewable energy in order to both meet their net zero targets and be better prepared against rising prices should another unprecedented event, such as the war, happen in the future.