Fact check: ‘40 new hospitals’, Starmer’s working hours and potholes

This summary of claims from the campaign trail has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information, as part of the PA news agency’s Election Check 24.

How many of the ‘40 new hospitals’ have been built?

Both Labour and the Conservatives have made misleading statements about progress on the government’s promise to build 40 new hospitals by 2030.

Of the 40 schemes designated “new hospitals” in the government’s plans, one — the Dyson Cancer Centre in Bath — has been completed. It opened for patients in April 2024.

In a report last year, the National Audit Office (NAO) described the project as “a new build on existing NHS estate to provide cancer treatment facilities in a new building”. It judged that this met the government’s broad definition of a “new hospital”, which can include “a major new clinical building or a new wing, providing a whole clinical service, at an existing hospital”.

It is therefore not correct, by the government’s definition of a new hospital at least, to say none have been built, as Labour shadow health secretary Wes Streeting claimed on X (formerly Twitter) at the end of May, and as at least one Labour candidate has claimed in a Facebook ad.

And it would be misleading to suggest six have been opened, as the Conservative health secretary Victoria Atkins appeared to in Parliament on 23 May, and when asked about the 40 hospitals on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on 2 June.

On 23 May Ms Atkins said: “Through our new hospital programme, we have committed to delivering 40 new hospitals by 2030. I am pleased to tell the House that six hospitals are now open to patients.”

But when we asked the Department of Health and Social Care about this claim, it referred us to six hospitals listed in a Parliamentary written answer.

This list included the Dyson Center, but the other five were all projects that predated the government’s commitment and that the NAO has said are not counted towards the 40-hospital target.

Keir Starmer’s working hours

A Conservative post on X said of the Labour leader: “Keir Starmer has said he’d clock off work at 6pm if he became Prime Minister. You deserve better than a part-time Prime Minister.” Conservative health minister Maria Caulfield meanwhile referred on Sky News to “Keir Starmer saying he was going to be doing a four day week”.

But Sir Keir Starmer has not said he’d only work up to 6pm generally, or for four days of the week — he actually said in a radio interview that he’d try to finish work by 6pm specifically on Fridays.

Mr Starmer told Virgin Radio on Monday: “We’ve had a strategy in place and we’ll try to keep to it, which is to carve out really protected time for the kids. So on a Friday—I’ve been doing this for years—I will not do a work-related thing after six o’clock, pretty well come what may … There are a few exceptions, but that’s what we do.”

Are there more potholes in Britain than craters on the moon?

Labour has claimed there are 100 times as many potholes on Britain’s roads as there are craters on the moon. This doesn’t appear to be true – though counting potholes or craters on the moon isn’t an exact science.

We don’t know for certain how many potholes there are in the UK—the RAC claims there were over one million in 2023, but this is a rough estimate based on partial data.

To support its claim, Labour appears to have used an estimate that there are just over 9,000 craters on the moon. But this appears to refer only to craters recognised by the International Astronomical Union.

The Lunar Crater Database — archived by the US Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center — counts around 1.3 million lunar impact craters and is “approximately complete for all craters larger than about 1-2 km in diameter”. In all, more than two million craters have been identified when including those smaller than 1km, but this count of smaller craters is incomplete, a geographer at the Astrogeology Science Center told Full Fact.