Fact check: Interest rates, council tax and a portrait of Angela Rayner
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.
Interest rates were not at 11% under the last Conservative government
At Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said, when discussing the record of the previous Conservative government: “What did the Conservatives leave? Interest rates were at 11%.”
And Seema Malhotra MP, the minister for migration and citizenship, made the same claim on Monday, in a now-deleted X (formerly Twitter) post. Alongside a clip of Sir Keir’s comments at PMQs, Ms Malhotra wrote that “under the Tories” there had been “interest rates at 11%” and “14 years of failings”.
But the claim that interest rates were at 11% under the last Conservative government is not correct. The Bank of England’s Bank Rate (also known as the base rate), which influences the interest rates offered by other UK banks, has not been as high as 11% since 1991.
The base rate was 5.25% in July 2024 when the Conservatives left office, the highest it had been since the spring of 2008.
The Bank of England says the base rate is “the single most important interest rate in the UK”. While average mortgage rates offered by lenders are normally a bit higher than the base rate, we’ve seen no evidence that they reached anywhere close to 11% under the last Conservative government.
It is possible that Sir Keir meant to refer instead to the rate of inflation, which reached 11.1% in October 2022, then fell before the Conservatives left office. We contacted Downing Street about Sir Keir’s claim but did not receive a response.
After Full Fact got in touch, Ms Malhotra deleted her X post and replaced it with a corrected version which referred to “inflation rates at 11%”, rather than interest rates, although as of Friday that post also seemed to have been deleted.
Did Labour promise to freeze council tax?
With millions of households facing increases to their council tax bill from April, we have seen a number of claims about Labour having pledged to freeze council tax.
At Prime Minister’s Questions on March 12, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said with reference to Sir Keir: “The average council tax bill is increasing by over £100 in April after he promised to freeze it.”
A video posted on social media by the Conservative Party last month appeared to make a similar claim. It featured several clips of Sir Keir pledging to freeze council tax “this year” or “next year”, without any indication of when those comments were made. The video was posted with the caption: “Keir Starmer thought he could get away with his council tax betrayal. But we kept the receipts.”
And we have seen separate claims circulating on social media. One video with two clips of Sir Keir stating that Labour would freeze council tax has been shared on Facebook with text which says “what Keir Starmer said about council tax last year”.
However, these videos do not show Sir Keir promising to freeze bills in 2025/26 – the clips actually date from March 2023, and show the Labour leader promising a one-year freeze (which was likely to have applied to the 2023/24 financial year, had Labour been in office then).
Campaigning ahead of the May 2023 local elections, Sir Keir announced that were Labour in government at the time, it would freeze council tax bills for a year in response to the cost-of-living crisis. At the time, neither Sir Keir nor then-shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves committed to implementing a freeze if Labour won the next general election. Sky News also reported that the policy was “not a solid pledge for the next general election”.
Labour’s 2024 general election manifesto did not directly mention council tax, and we have not found any examples of Labour making any specific commitment during the election campaign to freeze council tax, or other evidence of the party specifically pledging to freeze council tax in 2025/26.
It has been suggested by some that increasing council tax represents a breach of Labour’s manifesto commitment to “not increase taxes on working people”. But the wording of that pledge was unclear, so what might constitute a breach of it is disputed.
Since the election, ministers and the Treasury have said the “working people” tax pledge applied to taxes in people’s payslips, which would not include council tax. And even prior to the election Labour suggested the commitment did not extend to council tax, with Sir Keir and other senior figures apparently refusing to rule out council tax increases when asked in interviews.
We have twice asked the Conservative Party if it has any evidence that Sir Keir pledged to freeze council tax in the coming financial year specifically, but have not received a response. We have also approached Labour for comment.
Angela Rayner did not gift a portrait of herself to a Vietnamese politician
Posts on Facebook and X have shared a photo with claims that it shows Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner giving a framed portrait of herself to Vietnam’s deputy prime minister Nguyen Hoa Binh during his visit to the UK on March 18.
One post, which has been shared hundreds of times, says: “Angela Rayner gave a portrait of herself to the Deputy Prime Minister of Vietnam today. Yes this is real. What is wrong with her?”
But this is not accurate. The portrait was actually a gift for Ms Rayner, rather than the other way around.
A translated caption on an official photo by the Vietnam News Agency of the two politicians holding the painting states: “Permanent Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Hoa Binh (left) presents a souvenir to British Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner.”
The frame of the painting also includes a plaque, which (when zoomed in) can be seen to contain an inscription which reads: “With the compliments of H.E. Mr. NGUYEN HOA BINH Member of the Political Bureau First Deputy Prime Minister of the S. R. of Viet Nam.”