Four claims from the 2025 Budget debate fact checked

This roundup has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact-checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.

On Wednesday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, delivered the second Budget of this Labour Government.

Full Fact has fact checked a number of claims made by the Chancellor in her speech, and by the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in her Budget response. We’ve looked below at four such claims – for more, see Full Fact’s Budget 2025 round-up.

Has the Chancellor kept ‘every single one’ of Labour’s manifesto commitments?

The Government’s decision to extend the freeze on income tax and national insurance thresholds by three years has led many to accuse Labour of breaking its manifesto pledges on tax.

Labour’s 2024 election manifesto said: “Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase national insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax, or VAT.”

Freezing personal tax thresholds means people pay more tax than they would if thresholds rose with inflation (as is the default).

At last year’s budget, the Chancellor herself appeared to say that extending threshold freezes would break the manifesto pledge for this reason, saying at the time: “I am keeping every single promise on tax that I made in our manifesto, so there will be no extension of the freeze in income tax and national insurance thresholds.”

Yet despite this, at the end of her 2025 Budget speech, Ms Reeves claimed to have kept “every single one” of Labour’s manifesto commitments.

The Government now appears to be arguing that Labour’s manifesto commitments apply only to the rates of income tax and national insurance contributions, and that therefore the extension of the threshold freezes does not break its pledge.

Answering questions from the media following the Budget, Ms Reeves said “in the manifesto we were very clear it was the rates of income tax and national insurance and VAT”.

The wording in Labour’s manifesto about not increasing income tax is clear that it applies to “rates”, for “working people” at least, and it does not explicitly mention the thresholds at which income tax rates apply.

But its commitment on national insurance is less specific, and the wording does not appear to clearly relate only to rates. And as a result, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said it believes the Budget does breach Labour’s manifesto tax promise.

Regardless of the specific wording, it is clear that extending these threshold freezes will mean working people pay more tax than they otherwise would have done – a point Ms Reeves herself has appeared to acknowledge since the Budget, saying she is “asking ordinary people to pay a little bit more”.

We’ve looked into this in more detail in our ‘Has the chancellor kept Labour’s manifesto commitments on tax?’ fact check.

How many more NHS appointments has the Government delivered?

Ms Reeves claimed in her speech that the Government has delivered 5.2 million extra NHS appointments since the general election.

As we explain in our Government Tracker, it is true that there were 5.2 million additional NHS appointments in England between July 2024 and June 2025 compared with the year before (once the data has been adjusted to standardise the number of working days). But that does not tell the full story.

Historic NHS data shows that by recent standards 5.2 million extra appointments in a year is not a particularly large rise. The equivalent figure the year before, under the Conservatives, was 6.5 million.

The number of NHS appointments has been rising for a long time, as it has to, to meet the health needs of a growing and ageing population.

Is unemployment up ‘every single month’ under Labour?

Responding to the Chancellor’s Budget speech, Mrs Badenoch claimed unemployment “is up every single month since Labour have been in office”, adding to MPs, “they don’t want to hear it but it’s true”.

She has made this claim several times before, and we have also heard it from other Conservative MPs. But it is not quite correct. While it is true that unemployment has increased under Labour, it has not gone up “every single month”.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate that the number of unemployed people increased by approximately 309,000 between May-July 2024, around the time Labour came to office, and July-September 2025, the most recent period for which figures are available.

But they also show a number of small month-to-month decreases in the number of people unemployed during Labour’s time in government.

Similarly, while the rate of unemployment has increased overall since Labour entered government, there are certain months during which the unemployment rate remained the same when rounded to one decimal place (as the headline figures are published), and the unrounded figures suggest that there were actually some small decreases (though unrounded figures are typically subject to more uncertainty).

It is worth noting this data all comes from the Labour Force Survey. The ONS has warned estimates from the survey should be treated with caution because of lower than usual response rates since the pandemic.

Is the Government ‘miles behind’ on house building?

Mrs Badenoch also mentioned the Government’s house-building target in her Budget response and said it was “miles behind” its construction plans. In its 2024 manifesto, Labour pledged to build 1.5 million homes in England by the end of this Parliament.

Progress against this is being measured using figures for ‘net additional dwellings’, which measure the change in overall housing stock. This includes new builds, conversions, demolitions and changes of use.

We have official net additional dwellings data for the financial year 2024/25, which covers the last few months of the Conservative government as well as roughly the first nine months of Labour’s time in office. These figures show a net 208,600 homes were added to England’s stock that year, down from the 221,410 homes that were added in 2023/24.

This only takes us up to early April 2025 though, and we do not know how many of these homes were added while the Conservatives were still in government.

However, estimates from the Government using weekly domestic Energy Performance Certificate lodgements (then adjusted for demolitions) give a better idea of what has been happening specifically in the period since Labour won the election.

These show that between July 9 2024 and November 9 2025 there were 275,600 net additional dwellings added to England’s stock — around 18.4% of the 1.5 million target.

Based on our calculations this suggests the government will need to pick up the pace if it wants to see that pledge fulfilled. At the current rate it would take nearly six more years to hit the target of 1.5 million, so our Government Tracker is currently rating this promise as “appears off track”.