Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Thanks for joining us for Verify Live today.

Our big focus was on the government’s Spending Review, where we examined a range of announcements, from the NHS in England to policing and the asylum system. You can watch BBC Verify correspondent Ben Chu summarise the winners and losers in this video.

Elsewhere, the team used mapping and satellite tools to investigate reports of a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian gunpowder plant.

And we previewed a new BBC Trending episode investigating claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa.

This evening we’ll continue to review all we have found so far from the four aid sites in the Gaza Strip since they opened on 26 May.

Richard Irvine-Brown and Thomas Spencer
BBC Verify

We've been reviewing several clips on social media after a second night of disorder in Ballymena, County Antrim, which saw five arrests and 17 injured police officers.

The disorder began on Monday after a peaceful protest over an alleged sexual assault in the town.

Images, including several clips from TikTok live streams reposted on X, show how Tuesday’s disorder moved towards the centre of the town through the day and into the night.

We’ve mapped these posts in sequence based on the times they were uploaded and the day/night scenes they portray.

1. Local police issue a warning, external of a "serious disturbance" on Clonavon Terrace saying "the public should avoid the area"
2. (a and b) Fires started on the A26 road and adjoining car park, as well as at the junction with Bridge Street to the south-east where police vehicles can be seen
3. Person seen on fire, which was quickly put out, at the north-east end of Clonavon Road
4. Fireworks thrown and explosions heard with fire and police vehicles seen at the junction of Linehall Street and Bridge Street

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Chancellor Rachel Reeves said during her speech to the Commons and Labour posted on X, external: “Real wages have grown by more in the first 10 months of this Labour government than in the first 10 years of the previous Conservative government.”

To check what has happened to real wages - that’s pay adjusted to reflect rising prices - you go to a spreadsheet from the Office for National Statistics called EARN01 and you want sheet 6, external.

These are the key figures for average weekly earnings adjusted for inflation.

First 10 years of Conservatives:

May 2010: £495

April 2020: £492

First 10 months of Labour:

July 2024: £523

April 2025: £526

So the chancellor is right, but the dates are a bit selective. For example, if you went up to January 2020 instead of April so that you did not get a Covid effect, you would get a figure of £500.

Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the growth in real wages in the first 10 years of the Conservative (and Conservative-led) government was pretty limited.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, PA Media

Our team listened to Rachel Reeves’ Spending Review earlier.

In case you missed it, here are three things we looked into:

• NHS funding boost: The chancellor announced that the NHS in England will get more money over the next three years. Given the NHS accounts for a large proportion of day-to-day spending and factoring in the overall pot of money for this type of spending set in last year's Budget, that confirms there will be little left for unprotected departments such as transport and environment, food and rural affairs
• Asylum hotel pledge: Elsewhere in the speech, Reeves reiterated the government’s pledge to “end the costly use of asylum hotels”. But the number of asylum seekers staying in hotels has risen since Labour got into power last year and the number of hotels being used for this purpose had risen, as of December. The latest figures show the daily cost of asylum hotels was about £8m, although per-person costs are coming down. About £3bn was spent on hotels for asylum seekers in the UK in the 2023-24 financial year - compared with £2.2bn in the year before
• Neighbourhood police: The Spending Review also revealed that police funding will rise by an average of 2.3% a year in real terms. Reeves said this will fund 13,000 more neighbourhood police – something Labour had already promised to do by 2029. Overall police numbers are slightly higher than they were in 2010 but they have not kept up with population increases in this period

Robert Cuffe
BBC Verify head of statistics

Image source, PA Media

Following the announcement of the Spending Review the government has published two sets of figures to describe how fast departmental budgets are growing.

One version includes spending increases that happened in 2023/24 and 2024/25. The other covers the rest of this parliament when budget growth will slow down a lot.

Take the Home Office for example.

Its budget rose by £1.7bn over the last two years. But over the next three, it’s set to rise by a lot less - £0.3bn.

If you include both periods then the real growth in budgets across all departments of 2.3% a year looks “rather strong”, according to the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies.

But they add “things look tighter” with growth over the rest of this parliament of 1.5%.

Neither figure is wrong - but it is easy to mix up the two and think the government’s future plans are more generous than they are.

Emma Pengelly
BBC Verify journalist

We’ve been analysing a video shared on X that has had nearly 100,000 views which shows an aid distribution site in Gaza being overrun by a large crowd.

The footage is the latest snapshot of some of the chaos that has unfolded at or near the sites since they opened more than two weeks ago.

At the beginning of the clip we see silhouettes of individuals gathering on sandy mounds beside fenced-off queuing areas in which people also stand tightly packed. Then, the crowd surges forward. People hurry towards the collection area and some climb over gates. Running, shouting and screaming follows. Near the camera, a voice in English is heard saying “this way”.

I’ve been working to identify where the video was filmed. In this instance existing footage of the aid distribution centres in Gaza have been the most useful for geolocation (finding them on satellite mapping tools).

Looking at a drone video and at ground-level photos published by the Israel Defense Forces on 27 May, the positioning of the lights, fencing and adjacent sandy mounds in this video helped to confirm it was filmed at the aid distribution site west of Rafah in the south-west corner of Gaza.

The video has been shared by Alon-Lee Green, leader of an Israeli anti-war group, who said it was sent directly to him by an American contractor working in Gaza. It’s not clear on which day the footage was captured. BBC Verify has contacted Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for more information.

Jonathan Griffin
BBC Verify journalist

We’ve been speaking to South Africans for a BBC Trending episode exploring the soured diplomatic relations between their country and the US.

In recent months false claims of a “white genocide” happening in South Africa have been repeated by both US President Donald Trump and his now former special advisor Elon Musk.

“I'm a white Afrikaans-speaking farmer. My family are white-speaking Afrikaans. I've never witnessed a genocide,” says Johann Kotzé, CEO of AgriSA - one of the largest agricultural organisations in South Africa.

An Afrikaner pressure group we’ve spoken to, AfriForum, has publicly called the frequency of farm murders “very high” compared with murders in the rest of the country - but in the process of making this programme it has become clear that official statistics don’t back their claim up.

BBC Verify’s Peter Mwai has been looking at statistics from the South African Police Service and found there were 44 farm murders of people from all racial groups in 2024 in a country that recorded 26,232 murders between January and December.

Usually the police don’t release data about the race of those killed in farm attacks but we do have data for the period between January and March 2025. Five out of a total of six people killed on farms were black. One was white.

No, there isn’t a "white genocide" happening in South Africa is available to listen to now on the BBC World Service website.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Satellite images provided by Planet Labs have shown that a fuel depot in the Russian city of Engels continued to burn yesterday following a Ukrainian strike last Friday.

As we reported at the time, verified footage from the city showed a fierce fire in the area of the depot. Satellite imagery released later that day showed flames emanating from at least two tanks.

Engels, which lies around 480km (300 miles) from the Ukrainian border, has been a frequent target during the conflict. The very same depot was hit twice in January - in fact, if you check the spot on Bing Maps, you can see the damage caused by those incidents, external.

And in March an ammunition depot at the city's air base exploded after it was targeted by a Ukrainian drone.

During yesterday’s nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky referred to Ukrainian strikes inside Russia, saying Kyiv's aim was to "not only spoil the mood in Moscow, but also undermine the real capacity of military production, army supplies and strategic potential”.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

During her Spending Review announcement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves reaffirmed one of the government’s asylum pledges.

She said: “We'll be ending the costly use of hotels to house asylum seekers in this parliament”.

The Spending Review, external says the government will do this by “clearing the [asylum] backlog, boosting appeals capacity and continuing to return those with no right to be here.”

Labour has previously promised to "end, external asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds, external" in its general election manifesto.

But recent figures, external show there were more asylum seekers staying in hotels in March 2025 than at the end of June 2024, a few days before the general election.

At the end of last June, there were 29,585 people staying in hotels. By March this year, there were 32,345 - though the number had dropped compared with December.

The government does not regularly publish information about the number of hotels used for this purpose but figures obtained by BBC Verify show there were 218 hotels being used for asylum seekers in December 2024, up from 212 in July 2024.

The per person cost of housing asylum seekers has come down though, according to Home Office officials.

You can read BBC Verify’s analysis of how the government’s getting on with its asylum pledges here.

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Rachel Reeves said during the Spending Review announcement that the NHS in England will get an extra 3% per year of real-terms day-to-day spending growth over the next three years.

Given the NHS accounts for just under 40% of day-to-day spending and the overall limit set for day-to-day spending in last year's Budget, that confirms there will be relatively little left for unprotected departments such as local government, environment and transport.

Some of those unprotected departments might well be facing real-terms cuts in day-to-day spending over the next three years.

We will examine the official documents - which have just been published, external - to confirm the details department by department.

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

There will be a focus on day-to-day spending squeezes for some public services, but it's worth bearing in mind that Rachel Reeves will also be spending a considerable amount of public money on infrastructure, known as capital spending.

In this Spending Review she will be allocating roughly £338bn of capital spending over the next four years, external (2026-27 to 2029-30), which will go on projects ranging from new social housing, to green energy schemes, to new transport links.

Over the three years to 2028-29, we estimate the government will be spending around £86bn more in total on capital than the previous Conservative administration planned.

Capital spending will average 2.6% of GDP over this period, up on the 1.8% in the inherited Tory plans.

One of the reasons the chancellor has been able to do this is that she changed the fiscal rules in her 2024 Budget to target a balance in only day-to-day spending, rather than total spending, enabling her to borrow more for capital projects.

Phil Leake
BBC Verify data journalist

We can expect plenty of big numbers from Chancellor Rachel Reeves when she delivers her Spending Review at around 12:30 BST.

At BBC Verify, there are a few key questions we often ask when reporting large sums of money. They include:

Over how long?

Governments will sometimes use the largest number available to them when discussing spending commitments.

For example, the government has pledged £86bn in investment spending for science and technology. This figure is the total for four years - the annual amount will reach £22.5bn by 2029-30.

What is the trade-off?

The chancellor has set herself a limited amount of money to allocate, which means that decisions to increase spending often involve a sacrifice elsewhere.

The NHS is set to receive one of the biggest uplifts in spending - £30bn by 2028-29 - but this will likely come at the cost of some other departments’ budgets, continuing a trend seen over the past 15 years.

Think tank The Resolution Foundation estimates that day-to-day health spending per person has risen by 30% since 2009-10, while several other departments have seen similar sized cuts.

How does it compare historically?

Another commitment is to increase defence spending from 2.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) to 2.5% by 2027 - worth around an extra £5bn a year on average.

Over the long-term, the defence budget has been declining: in the mid-1950s, it was equivalent to almost 8% of GDP.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify senior journalist

Spending Reviews are a minefield of technical terms. Here’s a quick guide to some of the phrases you may hear when Rachel Reeves sets out her plans shortly.

Fiscal rules: The chancellor has set herself rules to control borrowing and spending. The first rule states that day-to-day government spending should be paid from tax revenue and not from borrowing. This means borrowing should only be used to fund investment projects.

The second rule states government debt, as a share of the economy, should be on track to fall in five years. The aim is to ensure debt is on a sustainable path.

Headroom: This refers to the margin by which Reeves is on track to meet her rules. At the Spring Statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility - the official forecaster - said the government’s headroom was just £9.9bn. While that might sound like a lot, the government raises and spends more than one trillion pounds - so the chancellor does not have much wiggle room.

Day-to-day spending: This is what the government spends on the cost of running public services day-to-day, including things like teachers’ and doctors’ salaries and textbooks in schools.

Capital spending: Also known as “investment” spending, this is what the government spends on longer-term projects such as new roads and hospitals.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

One closely watched area in this afternoon’s Spending Review will be policing - after the government was warned that forces will find it hard to deliver its crime pledges without more money.

Police chiefs have also raised the issue of retaining officers, saying they’re worried about the number leaving and some forces have said they’re exploring staff cuts because of funding issues.

The government has pledged to recruit 13,000 more neighbourhood police by 2029.

In September 2024, there were 146,868 full-time equivalent (FTE) police officers in England and Wales, according to the latest figures., external

Although police officer numbers have risen slightly since 2010, they have not kept up with a population rise of about five million since then. , externalAbout 20,000 officers were lost between 2010 and 2019 after spending on the police was cut by the coalition government. , external

But after 2019 they began to rise again after the then Conservative government pledged to recruit an extra 20,000 - a target which they met in 2023.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify senior journalist

Rachel Reeves' much-anticipated Spending Review is due in about an hour - after Prime Minister's Questions in the UK's House of Commons. You can follow both events live here.

The government is expected to spend just over £1,300bn, external in 2025-26.

This includes money for public services like the NHS and schools - as well as other spending such as paying benefits and the interest on government borrowing.

Benefits (including the state pension) and social services are projected to be the biggest spending area (32% of the total) followed by health (21%) and debt interest (9%).

Today’s Spending Review will determine the budgets of individual government departments over three years.

While some areas such as the NHS and defence have been protected and are set to receive a boost in funding the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank has warned there will be “some very difficult decisions” for unprotected departments.

Its analysis suggests that some of these departments - which include transport and justice - may see real terms spending fall by about 1% per year in between 2025–26 and 2028–29 - that's about 3% in total.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify senior journalist

As is usual before big government announcements like today's Spending Review, a few of Rachel Reeves' plans have already been reported - like her pledge to spend £39bn on social and affordable housing over the next 10 years. You can read more about that on the BBC News live page here.

The social housing backlog in England is a significant issue - more than 1.3 million households were on social housing waiting lists in 2024. This is the highest level since 2014, according to the government’s figures, external. But the government points out the number of households waiting could be overstated due to some double counting - when someone is registered with more than one local authority.

A report from property company JLL, published in February, external, estimated that it would take 21 years to clear England’s current waiting list if nobody else was added to the current total.

Separately, the National Housing Federation recently found that families wanting properties with three or more bedrooms in the London boroughs of Westminster, Enfield and Merton would all have to wait more than a century to get a home at current rates.

Emma Pengelly
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, Telegram

In the early hours of this morning videos emerged on social media showing fiery explosions in the Tambov region in western Russia.

I matched the rooflines of buildings in the foreground of one video, along with fences and gates to match it with images on the Yandex mapping tool which has good coverage of Russia. The footage shows a large fire in the distance. The area includes an industrial plant in Kotovsk which is about 370km (229 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

Acting head of the region Evgeny Pervyshov said, external a large Ukrainian drone attack had been “repelled” and the fire was caused by a downed drone. We haven’t verified his claim yet.

Senior Ukrainian official Andriy Kovalenko said, external the Kotovsk site makes gunpowder and is one of the “key facilities” Russia uses in the war. It’s not the first time it has been targeted, he added.

It's also not the first time in recent days Ukraine is reported to have targeted industrial sites in Russia. On Monday Ukrainian media reported a plant in Cheboksary was targeted. On 6 June, a fuel storage facility serving a military airfield in Engels in the Saratov region was struck.

Meanwhile in Ukraine there have been overnight Russian air strikes reported in the Kharkiv and Odesa regions. A Ukrainian official said, external the attacks in Kharkiv region had killed three people and injured 60.

The UK government has pledged a "new era of nuclear power" after promising a major investment in the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk.

Sizewell C is the biggest nuclear programme to take place in a generation.

Ros Atkins looks at the reasons behind the government's significant investment, and how its plan fits into the UK's energy mix.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Hello and welcome to the live page.

We're here to share the work being done by the BBC's specialists in fact-checking, open-source video verification and data journalism.

The team is looking into a range of stories today:

• Our open-source intelligence team is assessing video posted on the Telegram messaging app showing what's said to be a Ukrainian drone strike on a factory in Russia
• They're working to double-check the location of the plant based on landmarks and buildings they can see in the video
• The fact-check and data teams are working on posts for this live page providing the background context ahead of what Chancellor Rachel Reeves announces in her Spending Review at 12:30 BST
• Our policy and analysis correspondent Ben Chu will be across the speech and will give his analysis across BBC News

First up - BBC Verify's Ros Atkins on how the Sizewell C nuclear power station fits with the government's aims of net zero and energy independence.