Martin Williams

Speaking on World Mental Health Day, the health secretary told MPs: “We’ve got 30,000 more people working in mental health today than we had when [Labour] left office.” But when questioned by FactCheck, the Department for Health admitted that Mr Hunt’s figure includes all professionally qualified clinical NHS staff in England – not just those working in mental health.

The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has defended the “market economy”, saying it has brought people out of poverty. In media interviews and his speech to Conservative conference, Mr Hammond repeatedly accused the Labour Party of posing a threat to this economic model. The chancellor even appeared to compare Labour’s policies to countries like North Korea and…

In his speech at the Labour Party Conference this week, Jeremy Corbyn promised to introduce rent controls. The announcement delighted many struggling private renters, but critics responded saying the move would damage the housing sector and be a “disaster for tenants”. So who’s right? What does ‘rent control’ actually mean? The main problem with the rent controls…

North Korea has claimed that Donald Trump has declared war. The US president had said North Korea’s leaders “won’t be around much longer” and referred to Kim Jong-Un as “Little Rocket Man”. This followed Mr Trump’s speech to the UN last week in which he warned that America would “totally destroy” North Korea if the…

The Conservative MP said that the “real reason” food bank usage has increased is that the government has allowed Jobcentre Plus to tell people they exist. Under Labour, this was not allowed, he said. But does that claim stand up to scrutiny?

It has been two years since Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy from Syria, was found washed up on a beach in Turkey. Since then, has the migration crisis improved or changed? And how many more people have died? FactCheck looked at the figures.

Storm Harvey has devastated the US state of Texas, with at least 33 people reported dead and thousands forced to evacuate their homes. But how does it compare to other weather disasters in America and around the world?

The best paid FTSE 100 executive received more than 1,700 times the average UK wage last year, an analysis by FactCheck shows. Sir Martin Sorrell, who runs the advertising and marketing giant WPP, earned more than £48m, including perks and pension. Overall, the highest earning executives in each of the FTSE 100 firms were paid an average of…

The UK is the only undisputed democracy in Europe to use the First Past The Post voting system to elect MPs. This could make a big difference to who represents us in parliament. New analysis by the Electoral Reform Society has estimated how this year’s General Election might have played out if Proportional Representation had been used instead.

Thousands of students have just received their A-level results and discovered whether they are off to university. But with so many students getting good grades and going to university, is the whole experience worth the same as it once was? FactCheck looked into the details.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, has defended the force’s stop and search tactics. There is no dispute that black Londoners are stopped and searched proportionally more often than white people, but Dick claimed this was not due to unfairness. FactCheck looked into the details.

Last month saw a spate of prison riots, with violence at jails in Hertfordshire and Worcestershire. Some commentators claimed the unrest was “a disaster waiting to happen”. But what’s really going on inside Briton’s prisons? And are prison officers facing an uphill battle to stay in control?

The government has announced a £1.3bn plan to expand the mental health workforce with a “challenging” recruitment drive. The aim is to help the NHS care for an additional one million patients by 2020-21, according to the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt. We put his claims to the FactCheck test.

It’s been 20 years since Tony Blair first introduced tuition fees. Since then, students have been lied to, misled and betrayed by politicians and political parties. FactCheck uncovers the long history of broken promises and political U-turns.

Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of U-turning on a pledge to scrap student debt. It follows a comment made during the election campaign, saying he would “deal with it”. But the context is important.