UK election podcast 1
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How do the hosts introduce More or Less's election fact-checking series?
Hello and welcome to the first of More or Less's election themed podcasts. I'm Charlotte MacDonald and I've invited Ruth Alexander in here today to introduce some extra pieces of work that she's been doing along with Tim Harford.
Yeah, Tim and I, we've been going regularly onto the PM programme on Radio 4, chatting to Eddie Mayer about the election campaign. And we've basically been looking at various claims made by the parties, putting them under the spotlight and seeing what light we can shed. And how's that been going? It's been going well, I think. You know, the politicians, they create a lot of heat, don't they? They throw a lot of statistics around. They make lots of bold claims. And it's just hard to make head or tail of it, really, I think, when you're just listening. So we take the time to look at these claims, look at these numbers and think, what do they really mean?
Thanks very much. So we've brought together a collection of some of the different things you've been talking about. We've got seven in total. We're going to go through them one by one. So let's start with claim one. Conservatives say living standards are higher.
Yet the Conservatives have made the improving economy a central part of their election campaign. Here's George Osborne explaining how things have improved.
Our economy is growing more strongly than people expected. Consumer confidence is at a 12-year high. Living standards are higher than when we came to office and rising strongly.
Here's Eddie Mair asking Ruth about that.
Ruth, let's go through what George Osborne had to say line by line. He said the UK economy is growing more strongly than people expected. Is that true?
Well, the numbers have been revised upwards for last year. And the Office of Budget Responsibility says the economy picked up more strongly than forecast in the last couple of years as a whole. However, it has also said that before that, the economy grew unexpectedly slowly until early 2013. But all things considered, I think we can give the Chancellor this one.
So the UK economy is growing more strongly than people expected. Is consumer confidence at a 12-year high?
Well, the Chancellor's referring to the GfK Consumer Confidence Index, which is derived from a survey of about 2,000 consumers who were asked about their personal finance situation, their savings, how they feel about making major purchases, and the overall economic situation. And the index has risen to plus four, and this is the highest since June 2002, so it is up. But consumer confidence fell after the last election when the coalition government came in. It was Minus 20 when they started, pretty gloomy, and then it became minus 30 after they'd been in office for 18 months. But since early 2013, it has been climbing strongly, although they have got a way to go if they hope to get to New Labour's high point of about plus 10.
But what these numbers really tell you is that consumers have been pessimistic about the economy and their personal situation for the past 12 or 13 years, and they've now just started to feel a little bit optimistic.
And this critical question at the heart of the electoral debate today, are living standards, as the Chancellor claims, are living standards higher than when the coalition came to office and rising strongly?
Well, he's talking about this because figures have been released from the Office for National Statistics showing that disposable incomes per head are about 0.2% higher than when the coalition government came to power in May 2010. And, you know, as we've heard, George Osborne's really pleased about this, but actually it's not much to shout about. For a start, being pretty much back to where we were in 2010 is hardly a giant leap forward. In fact, we've been living through the slowest recovery in modern economic history ever. And rising strongly, well, disposable incomes were at 1.9% at the end of 2014 compared to where they were a year earlier. But it may be too early to say this is a strong upward trend.
Talking to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, they say these numbers do tend to be quite volatile.
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