Reality Check

The Conservatives are promising the “largest ever pothole fixing programme”. They plan to allocate £500m a year for four years to fixing holes in the road.

So will that fix every hole?

According to the Asphalt Industry Association’s latest survey, nearly two million potholes were filled last year in England and Wales, at a cost of just under £100m. That’s about £50 a pothole.

Local authorities were able to fill over 300,000 more potholes than the previous year, though the sum spent barely rose.

That’s because councils are trying, a bit more, to fill in potholes as part of planned repairs, rather than patching them up on an ad-hoc basis.

Potholes are just one, very visible form of road surface degradation, all of which contribute to accidents and damage to vehicles.

How much would it cost to repair every road completely? Clearing the maintenance backlog on the whole road network would cost £9bn for England’s roads, plus £800m for Wales, according to the AIA.

Leaders from four parties appeared on a special edition of the BBC show. Did their claims stack up?

Reality Check

Boris Johnson said he would raise the starting threshold of national insurance to £9,500 in 2020-21, saving people £100 per year.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says the saving would be slightly less, £85 per year, external (£1.63 a week).

Reality Check

Jo Swinson claimed that the UK would have more money to spend if it remained in the EU.

It's true that the vast majority of forecasts do expect the economy would be bigger if the UK were to stay in.

The Lib Dems say this would amount to a £50bn "remain bonus" over five years. But this cannot be predicted with any certainty. Also, £50bn is not a hugely significant amount in terms of overall government expenditure.

Reality Check

An audience member suggested that Spain would not allow an independent Scotland to join the EU. Nicola Sturgeon claimed, in response, that Spain had never said this.

Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrell told Politico in an interview in November 2018 , externalthat Spain would have no objection to Scotland rejoining the EU as an independent nation, as long as the independence process from the UK was legally binding.

Reality Check

Jeremy Corbyn said: "95% of the population will pay no more whatsoever in tax" under a Labour government.

This is Labour's plan for income tax, but taxes on dividends and capital gains, which are paid by individuals, will be raised.

Reality Check

On corporation tax, Jeremy Corbyn says:

"The biggest business will be asked to pay a little bit more in corporation tax but it will be lower than in 2010 and lower than most industrial countries."

Under Labour's plan, corporation tax would rise from 19% to 26%, staggered over the next three years. Back in 2010/11 it was 28%.

Several European countries, at the moment, have higher corporation tax rates than this: France 32% and Belgium 29%. Both countries are planning reductions though: France to 28% and Belgium to 25%

Checking a claim from an audience member on Question Time who said £80,000 put him outside the top 5%.

Reality Check

As we mentioned earlier, a member of the audience on last night's Question Time criticised Labour's policy of raising income taxes for people earning more than £80,000 on the grounds that it wouldn't be enough to put them in the top 5% of earners. Reality Check has been looking at the numbers.

"I am nowhere near in the top 5%, let me tell you, I'm not even in the top 50%," he said, although he also confirmed that he was earning over £80,000.

HMRC publishes tables , externaleach year breaking down taxpayers in order of how much they earn.

The most recent figures, for 2016-17, show you needed to be earning £75,300 to be in the top 5%.

If you adjust that using average earnings figures from the ONS, external, it's likely that you need to be earning about £81,000 to be in the top 5% of income taxpayers today.

But the figures from HMRC exclude people earning too little to pay income tax. Once you include those people, the audience member would be well into the top 5% of all earners.

And he's certainly not outside the top 50% either - anything over about £25,500 would put him in the top half of income taxpayers.

You can read the full Reality Check here.

This post was corrected to reflect the HMRC figures excluding earners who do not make enough to pay income tax.

Is Labour's plan for 100,000 council houses and 50,000 housing association homes a year feasible?

The US is at the centre of an international row over claims to a slice of Syria's oil revenues.

The prime minister says a planned National Insurance cut would give everyone in the UK £500, but is he right?

Reality Check

Taking part in an ITV interview last night, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage said he wanted to halve the UK's foreign aid budget.

He said that over the last few years the UK has consistently been the highest spender on foreign aid.

But that's not what official figures show.

Last year, according to government data, external, the UK was the world's third largest overseas aid donor, spending a total of £14.6bn.

This was behind the US (£25.7bn) and Germany (£18.7bn). The UK was also the third highest donor in the previous year.

In terms of aid spending as a share of the economy, Sweden spent the highest, with 1.04% of national income going on overseas aid last year. The UK was in fifth place on this measure, with 0.7% of national income spent on foreign aid - an amount that meets the UN's target, external.

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have clashed in the first leaders' debate, we've been looking into some of their claims.

Reality Check

Boris Johnson said during the debate: "The economy has grown every year in the last nine years."

That is true for the years as a whole, although there have been quarters of negative growth during that period.

But the overall level of growth over those nine years has been the slowest we have seen since the early 1980s.

Reality Check

On his decision to postpone a planned fall in UK corporation tax from 19% to 17%, Mr Johnson claimed it was “already the lowest in Europe”.

But Ireland, for example, has a rate of 12.5%, according to statistics from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), external.

Reality Check

Jeremy Corbyn said: "There are 33,000 nurse vacancies at the moment in the NHS."

That's a bit of an understatement - there are currently 39,500 nursing vacancies in the NHS in England, according to figures from NHS Improvement.

Reality Check

“I said we'd upgrade 20 hospitals and have 40 new hospitals," Boris Johnson said. "That programme is going ahead.”

The government has already announced 20 hospitals they plan to upgrade. But is it building 40 new ones?

The government has pledged £2.7bn for building work on six hospitals. A further 34 will only share an initial £0.1bn to develop future plans - rather than start building immediately.

Reality Check

"I said that we would put 20,000 more police officers on the streets of... our country, and we are recruiting them now," Boris Johnson said a short time ago.

Since 2010, police officer numbers have decreased by 20,500 in England and Wales, so the 20,000 new ones would not quite replace them.

Reality Check

Jeremy Corbyn has just said that Boris Johnson's deal "narrowly got through the House of Commons with the support of the DUP".

That's not right - Mr Johnson's deal was supported by 285 Conservative MPs, 19 Labour MPs and 25 independents.

All 10 DUP MPs voted against the deal.