FactCheck: a strong housing market?

Last Modified: 14 May 2008
By: Channel 4 News

House prices, taxation and poverty: FactCheck gets to grips with the latest claims from Prime Minister's Questions.

The claim

"Yesterday in private the housing minister told cabinet that house prices would fall by up to 10 per cent, housebuilding was stalling and further falls are predicted. Yet in public the same minister told the public the housing market was strong."
David Cameron

The analysis

Housing minister Caroline Flint flashed her notes at photographers yesterday - and the picture was bleak. But how does the inadvertent eyeful compare to her public statements?

Just last Friday (9 May), she was widely quoted as saying: "The fundamentals of the housing market remain strong with high employment, low interest rates, and long-term demand for homes from first-time buyers."

It does sound like a far rosier picture - although luckily for the minister, the statement includes that key word, fundamentals, rather than saying outright that the market itself is blooming.

Source
BBC: repossession orders climb by 17 per cent

The claim

"I did say about the 10p that we should have done things better; I made that clear at the time."
Gordon Brown

The analysis

At what time? The notoriously unapologetic PM told the BBC on 30 April that he had made two mistakes: not to compensate the two groups worst affected by the scrapping of the 10p rate (low-paid people ineligible for tax credits, and 60-64-year-olds who miss out on the new higher pensioner tax allowance).

But this came more than a year after the move was announced.

Could Brown have been referring to the very existence of the 10p tax rate rather than its scrapping? Hardly. As FactCheck found last week, Labour has been bigging up the 10p tax rate up as "long-term commitment" since as far back as 1995.

The claim

"Even after yesterday's announcement a million of the poorest people in the country are still worse off."
Nick Clegg

The analysis

Clegg's quite right. As the government has been proudly telling us for the past 24 hours, all basic rate taxpayers - or around 22 million families - will get an extra £120 this year as a result of a raised income tax threshold.

But this means only 80 per cent of the 5.3 million families who lost out when the 10p rate of tax was scrapped in April are getting all their tax-grabbed money back.

The other 20 per cent - around 1.1 million of those earning between around £6,500 and £13,500 - are getting at least half of their money back. But this means they're still worse off than they were before.

In the worst-case scenario, someone earning £7,755 a year would have been made £232 worse off by the scrapping of the 10p tax. The new allowance has given them back £120 - so they've still lost out to the tune of £112 a year compared to pre-April.

The claim

"The level of employment in Britain is rising today to 29.5 million people, and half a million more people are in employment than there were a year ago."
Gordon Brown

The analysis

Another week, another Brown employment boast, although this time it's supported by brand spanking-new figures out today. Or is it?

The latest official stats (for the period up to March 2008) do show an extra 466,000 people in work compared to a year ago, and 117,000 more than three months ago.

But they also show 14,000 more unemployed people than three months ago - and more people claiming unemployment benefit to boot.

The unemployment rate - more useful than bare numbers, given that Britain's population is increasing anyway - is down by 0.3 percentage points over the year, but stayed the same for the past three months.

And it's this shorter-term figure that is arguably more pertinent today, given that Britain's economy has now been plunged in to murkier, credit crunch-infested waters. Not necessarily a disaster, but not, perhaps unsurprisingly, one to which the PM drew attention today.

Source
Employment: rate increases to 74.9 per cent

The claim

"We have taken 600,000 children out of poverty and another 300,000 children are to be taken out of poverty."
Gordon Brown

The analysis

That's more like it - the 600,000 at least. Brown's taken of late of claiming to have taken a million children out of poverty, which as we pointed out last week and the week before just isn't borne out by the official statistics.

The real figure is 600,000 - and whether 300,000 more children have been pushed above the poverty line remains to be seen when the latest (delayed) stats are brought out next month.

Source
Households Below Average Income (HBAI)

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