Fact check: General election petition, the law on spiking, and NHS waiting lists
Round-up of fact checks from the last week compiled by Full Fact.
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Your support makes all the difference.This roundup 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.
General election petition signatories
Posts on social media have wrongly claimed that the data behind a high-profile petition calling for a general election shows that it has been signed thousands of times with MPs’ names – and implied that this shows the petition itself is flawed.
The petition on the UK Parliament website titled Call A General Election had been signed more than 2.8 million times as of Thursday afternoon. However, some social media users have shared an image of data from the petition and claimed it shows thousands of those signatures are from MPs, or those using MPs’ names.
One post said: “Hey look their petition is so good even (Prime Minister Sir) Keir Starmer has signed 584 times so far.”
But this is not what the petition’s website shows.
As stated in the ‘about petition data’ section of Parliament’s petitions website, the data concerned “is not a list of people who have signed the petition”. It instead shows the number of people who have signed the petition by “country as well as in the constituency of each Member of Parliament”.
A House of Commons spokesperson confirmed to Full Fact that the data does not show the number of times an individual MP had signed the petition, or the number of signatures using an MP’s name.
While it’s possible MPs may have signed the petition, or that others may have signed it using MPs’ names, we cannot know for sure. No list of named signatories is made public, and the only name that is shared on the site is that of the petition creator.
Petitions on the Parliament website which gain 100,000 signatures are considered for debate in Parliament. The Prime Minister has since ruled out calling an early general election in response to the petition.
What’s the law on spiking?
We’ve seen some confusion online following the Prime Minister’s claim on X (formerly Twitter) that “spiking will be made a criminal offence”, with some commentators saying this is already the case or accusing him of “sloppy and misleading” wording.
‘Spiking’ involves adding either alcohol or drugs to drinks without the drinker’s knowledge or consent (‘drink spiking’), or injecting someone with drugs or another substance without their knowledge or consent (‘needle spiking’).
As a Home Office fact sheet from last December makes clear, spiking is already a crime. The Government appears to be planning to make spiking a specific criminal offence – though that wasn’t made clear in Sir Keir’s post on X.
Currently spiking may be prosecuted under a number of existing laws, including:– Offences against the Person Act 1861– Sexual Offences Act 2003– Criminal Justice Act 1988.
However, none of these laws include a specific offence of ‘spiking’ or appear to directly use the term. Instead, someone suspected of spiking can currently be prosecuted under a number of broader offences, such as “maliciously administering poison” so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm or “administering a substance with intent” to engage in a non-consensual sexual activity.
Speaking to ITN, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, Jess Phillips, said: “Currently spiking sits across various different pieces of legislation and isn’t necessarily that easy to spot and also charge in criminal law, so we’re going to introduce a new crime of spiking.”
People on NHS waiting lists
Treasury and Department for Work and Pensions minister Emma Reynolds said on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? last Friday that the Government had inherited “seven-and-a-half million people waiting on waiting lists for operations”.
This appears to confuse the number of people on the NHS England waiting list with the number of cases – a common mistake we’ve seen many times before, and which Full Fact’s AI tools have spotted at least 50 times in the past year.
In fact, in July 2024, the month of the general election, there were about 6.4 million people on the NHS England waiting list, according to non-emergency referral-to-treatment (RTT) data, in a total of about 7.6 million cases. Some people are waiting for treatment for more than one thing, so there are always more cases than people.
Cases on the waiting list are also not necessarily waits “for operations”, as Ms Reynolds said. Although some people will be admitted for surgery, others may receive medicine, equipment or advice to help with their condition, or a decision might be taken to monitor their progress, or not to treat them at all.
Full Fact approached Ms Reynolds for comment.