Reality Check

The post-Brexit trade talks between the UK and the EU are going down to the wire, and need to make progress in the next few days if a deal is to emerge before the end of the year.

But the negotiators appear to have hit a brick wall on some fundamental issues.

• The’ level playing field’ - this disagreement is over the extent to which the UK will follow EU rules, for example on government support for businesses and industry and workers’ rights, once it has left the transition period

• Governance - the two sides need to agree how any deal will be enforced and how disputes will be resolved
• Fishing - The UK wants its fishermen to have rights to all the fish in its waters, whereas the EU wants to maintain the quota system that shares these fish among member states

Our Reality Check team look at the issues in detail here

Image source, Getty Images

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Peter Mwai
BBC Reality Check

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The office of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has said that most of the refugees who’ve fled from the Tigray region into neighbouring Sudan appear to be male, rather than women or children.

But is he right?

Data from the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, show while more than half the refugees are male (57%), adult males are outnumbered by women and children.

In fact, children below the age of 17 comprise 45% of the refugees - split equally between male and female children.

It is only among adults - who form about half of the refugee population - that the proportion of men is greatest at around 60%.

The UNHCR compiled the data from assessing 7,000 refugees who have crossed into Sudan through the Hamdayet border point.

An estimated 45,000 refugees have crossed the border, most of them through Hamdayet, since the conflict broke out in Ethiopia early last month, although the number arriving has been dropping in recent days.

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Reality Check

Chancellor Rishi Sunak defended the government’s decision to cut foreign aid spending from 0.7% of national income to 0.5%.

He said that, even after the change next year, “the UK would remain the second highest aid donor in the G7”.

According to the latest data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, external (OECD) the UK’s current foreign aid budget is smaller in absolute terms than both the United States’ and Germany’s.

In 2019, the UK spent $19.4bn (£14.6bn) on foreign aid, while the US allocated $34.6bn (£25.9bn) to foreign aid and Germany spent $23.8bn (£17.9bn).

Mr Sunak has said that UK aid spending will fall to $13.3 (£10bn) in 2021.

Both the US and Germany have larger economies than the UK so when you look at aid spending as a proportion of national income, the UK – with its current 0.7% - ranks higher than them – and tops the list of the G7 wealthiest countries:

When the UK aid budget falls to 0.5% next year - it will drop behind Germany (0.6%), putting it in second place in the G7 - as the Chancellor said.

But if the reduced aid budget remained the same into 2022, the UK would also fall behind France, external - which plans to increase its aid budget to 0.55% of GDP by 2022

Mr Sunak did say the government’s “intention is to return to 0.7% when the fiscal situation allows” but gave no specific timeline.

Reality Check

During his speech earlier, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak referenced some key pledges on public sector recruitment.

Despite the disruption caused by coronavirus, some of these have shown progress over the past year:

• There are 5,824 additional police officers in England and Wales compared with October 2019, recruited through the “uplift” scheme. The government has pledged to recruit 20,000 additional officers by March 2023.

• The number of nurses in the NHS in England increased by 13,781 in the year to July. The government has pledged to increase the number of nurses by 50,000 by 2024.

• But there are 335 fewer GPs in June 2020 than there were in the previous year. The government pledged 6,000 more GPs by 2024.

When it comes to NHS staffing numbers, we are comparing with the same month in the previous year rather than December 2019 (when the election was held), because there can be seasonal dips in staff numbers. This means the comparisons are more like-for-like.

And on policing, it is important to remember that around 20,000 police officers were cut between 2010 and 2018.

Reality Check

The government announced in July that it would be cutting the foreign aid budget by £2.9bn this year.

It was set to be £15.8bn this year (but that was before the pandemic struck) so the cut would bring it down to £12.9bn.

The amount spent on foreign aid is fixed – by law - at 0.7% of GNI (that’s a measure of how much is produced in the economy, similar to GDP).

As the economy is expected to be considerably smaller this year because of the impact of Covid-19, it means 0.7% of it will be worth less.

The £2.9bn implies that the government is expecting the economy to be about 18% smaller this year than they thought before the pandemic.

As it is rumoured that the government may also be planning to cut the aid budget to 0.5% of GNI, which would reduce it to about £9.2bn this year, although you would expect it to be more in subsequent years when the economy recovers.

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