This round-up 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.

New living standards pledge analysed by Full Fact’s Government Tracker

On Thursday, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer detailed a series of commitments — or “milestones” — in a major speech unveiling the Government’s new “Plan for Change”.

While many of the goals featured in Labour’s manifesto, some appear to be new commitments, including the pledge to deliver “higher living standards in every part of the United Kingdom by the end of the parliament”.

We’ve added this pledge to our Government Tracker, which we launched last month to monitor progress in delivering the pledges.

The Government says it will measure “headline progress” on the new pledge through “higher real household disposable income per person and GDP per capita” by the end of the parliament, and that it will also track GDP per capita at a regional level.

Real household disposable income (RHDI) is a commonly used measure of living standards — it has risen in every parliamentary term since records began in 1950, but saw the weakest overall growth during the previous parliament.

GDP per capita refers to the size of a country’s economy divided by its population.

The Government has only specified that these measures must be higher at the end of the current parliament (set to be the 2029/30 financial year) than at the start — it has not set a numerical target.

For now we’ve rated this pledge as “wait and see”, as it has only just been announced and we don’t have enough data to assess overall progress.

The latest data for RHDI does not include the period since Labour came into power.

We do have some data for overall GDP per capita, which shows that in the first three months of Labour’s time in office it decreased by 0.1% compared with the previous quarter. Regional GDP per capita data covering this period has not yet been published.

Did Kemi Badenoch say she wouldn’t reverse the national insurance increase?

At the last two Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir has claimed that Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said she wouldn’t reverse the recent rise in employers’ national insurance contributions.

Speaking last Wednesday, the PM said: “On Monday she said that she wouldn’t reverse the increase in national insurance.”

That doesn’t appear to be quite what Ms Badenoch said, although neither Labour nor the Conservatives have responded to our questions about their leaders’ comments.

Sir Keir appears to have been referring to comments made by Ms Badenoch at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference on November 25.

But we’ve not been able to find any evidence from reports at that event that Ms Badenoch said definitively that she would or would not reverse the national insurance increase.

Asked directly about her position at the event, she said: “Where we can see that a change that has been brought in in the Budget will obviously not work and will not raise any money, we will change that.”

While it could be argued that the increase in national insurance will raise money, and therefore wouldn’t be changed by the Conservatives, Ms Badenoch did not explicitly say this.

She went on to say her party would “look again” at the increase because so many organisations had said it was becoming unaffordable, but also appeared to avoid being drawn into a definitive answer, saying: “What I’m not going to do is comment on every bit of micropolicy.”

Some news outlets reported Ms Badenoch’s comments at the time as her refusing to commit to reversing the increase in national insurance.

A Labour press release last week did not make the same claim as Sir Keir, but said that at the CBI conference Ms Badenoch “refused to say that the Tories would reverse employer national insurance contribution changes”.

Viral plane crash image is digital art

A dramatic image of an aeroplane crashing into a bridge is being shared online with misleading claims that it shows a real disaster.

It appears to show a passenger plane which has flown into the side of a large bridge on which cars are travelling, and the beginning of a fire or explosion.

But the picture, which is circulating on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook with some captions claiming it is a “real life scenario”, does not depict a real event.

It is actually a piece of digital art by a Canadian graphic designer.