Fact check: Youth unemployment in Wales and fake Kuwait base photo

This roundup 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.

Are one in six young people in Wales unemployed?

In a post on Facebook this week, Plaid Cymru’s Senedd candidate for Gwyr Abertawe, Harri Roberts, claimed that “one in six” young people in Wales are “unemployed”.

This is not quite right, and after Full Fact first published its fact check, Plaid Cymru deleted the post.

Broadly speaking, the unemployment rate is the percentage of people who are available to work, but do not have a job. We have written more about how unemployment is measured here.

The latest available statistics do show that as of September 2025, the unemployment rate for 16-24-year-olds in Wales was 16.3%, or roughly one in six.

But Mr Roberts’ claim does not account for the fact that 41% of 16-24-year-olds in Wales are ‘economically inactive’ (meaning they’re not working or looking for work).

So the 16.3% figure does not refer to the overall percentage of 16-24-year-olds in Wales who are “unemployed”.

As a percentage of all 16-24-year-olds in Wales, unemployment is more like 9.6%—or roughly one in 10.

Looking at the actual numbers involved, the September 2025 data shows that there were around 340,200 16-24-year-olds in total in Wales.

Some 201,000 of these were recorded as “economically active”, of whom 32,800 were counted as unemployed.

Roughly two-thirds of the 139,300 economically inactive young people in Wales are students.

It would be accurate to say that roughly one in six 16-24-year-olds in Wales are not in education, employment or training (a category known by the acronym Neet).

But this is a broader group that includes young people who are economically inactive but not studying or in training (including, for example, people who are unable to work for health reasons and people caring for family), as well as those who are looking for work (the unemployed).

Photo of ‘damaged US base in Kuwait’ is fake

A widely shared image that appears to show a destroyed US base in Kuwait is fake.

The image, which circulated on Facebook, Instagram and Threads last week, appears to have been taken from the air.

It shows a cluster of severely damaged buildings, with visible flames and smoke plumes rising from them, and is captioned: “Latest Status of the US Base in Kuwait.”

Prior to the current ceasefire, US bases in Kuwait were reportedly attacked by Iran—but this is not a real image.

It does not appear to match genuine satellite imagery of US military bases in Kuwait, or media reports of attacks.

And we found it contained an invisible SynthID watermark, which indicates it was created or edited with Google’s AI tools.