BBC News Reality Check

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Following last week’s by-election in Uxbridge, Labour leader Keir Starmer pointed out that Sadiq Khan is legally required to reduce air pollution.

Opposition to Ulez was seen as the deciding factor in why Labour failed to win Boris Johnson's old seat from the Conservatives.

Starmer called on Khan to “reflect” on the scheme, but emphasised the mayor’s hands were somewhat tied. “If the law requires you to do something you can’t simply do nothing,” he said.

Starmer is right that Khan is legally obliged to do something about air quality, but the law does not specify expanding Ulez.

Under the Environment Act, all local authorities are required to ensure the air quality in their areas does not breach legal limits on pollution.

London meets legal limits for most pollutants, but still has illegally high levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2).

As such Khan is legally required to take “appropriate measures” to bring air pollution in London in line with legal limits. How he does this is not set out in law.

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

In short, it depends who you ask and which vehicles you are including.

The mayor of London was criticised by the statistics regulator for saying that nine out of 10 households in outer London that had a car already met the emissions standards - his office said he had mis-spoken.

What the figures actually showed was that nine out of 10 cars seen driving in outer London on a typical day were Ulez-compliant, which means about 78,000 cars were not compliant - but that's not the same thing.

The BBC has asked repeatedly to see the data behind the nine out of 10 claim, but has only been sent headline figures so far.

A separate freedom of information request by the BBC to Transport for London (TfL) showed that one in six cars registered in outer London did not meet Ulez standards last year.

These cars won’t necessarily be on the road every day, but it means roughly 280,000 vehicles in outer London would be liable for the charge if they were driven on London’s roads.

Looking at the whole of London, the RAC used a freedom of information request to establish that as of February, 691,559 licensed cars in the whole of London failed to meet standards. And if you include other vehicles such as vans and lorries the number increases to 851,065.

Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden told MPs: "We have introduced the National Living Wage, something the party opposite totally failed to do, and increased the National Living Wage by the largest amount ever."

The Conservatives did indeed introduce the National Living Wage in 2016, but it was in many ways identical to the National Minimum Wage, which Labour introduced in 1999.

In April, the NLW rate for people aged 23 and over increased by 92p per hour, which was a 9.7% increase.

This is a higher increase in cash terms than in any other year, but it was increased so much because the rate of inflation is so high. If rising prices are taken into account, it will not feel like as big an increase to employees.

In his speech this morning, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced a target to “boost child development with half a million more children hitting their early learning targets by 2030”.

The target - which applies to England only - will be measured using Department for Education data which looks at teacher assessments of pupils at the end of Reception (ages four to five).

In the latest data from 2022, 65% of 623,000 Reception pupils were recorded as having a good level of development across areas such as communication, language, mathematics and literacy.

Under its education plans, Labour wants the proportion of children who reach this development goal to rise to 90% by 2030. But how does this equal to half a million more children?

It may sound like a pledge for a single year, but Labour told us the figure was actually cumulative, so an extra 500,000 children in total would hit their targets between 2025 and 2030.

During his speech, Keir Starmer said: “Getting rid of the tax breaks for private schools and VAT does yield over £1bn."

That’s a lower figure than Labour was using at the end of last year, when they said it would raise £1.7bn.

Of that, £1.6bn was supposed to come from stopping independent school fees being exempt from VAT of 20%, set out in this report from the Resolution Foundation.

The rest comes from requiring independent schools to pay business rates.

There have been questions about how much the amount raised would be hit by having to fund state school places for children whose families could no longer afford private schools.

A report from the think tank EDSK said that to raise £1bn from VAT you would have to assume that no more than 5% of pupils would switch from private to state schools.

We asked Labour how they had worked out this new lower figure, but have not yet heard back.

Dowden said earlier: "Waiting lists are coming down."

He is right that the number of people waiting in England for more than two years or 18 months is coming down.

However, the overall list of patients awaiting treatment has not been reduced. It rose to a record high of 7.42 million people in April 2023.

The current NHS plan expects the overall waiting list to be falling by March 2024.

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Oliver Dowden told MPs that the UK has had the “fastest growing economy in the G7 for the last two years”.

The Group of Seven (G7) is a grouping of advanced economies, including the UK.

The UK economy grew by 7.6% in 2021 and by 4% in 2022. This was the fastest in the G7 in both years.

However, the UK had further to recover than other G7 countries, having still not returned to the level of economic output it had before the pandemic.

And in 2023, the International Monetary Fund predicts that the UK’s economy will grow by 0.4% – one of the lowest in the G7.

The deputy prime minister told MPs earlier: “It’s under this party that we have record levels of housing being built.”

The measure of new homes generally used is net additional dwellings for England, which is the difference between the number of new homes completed or converted and the number demolished.

The figure of 242,700 for 2019-20 was a record for the figures, which go back to 1991.

But we also have figures for housing completions and this data goes back to 1946.

The record on this measure was in 1968, when there were at least twice as many homes completed in England than in any year under the current Conservative government.

A striking image showing a group of young men driving a French police van, with one hanging out of the window brandishing a gun, has been shared on Twitter with the words "France, photo of the day".

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The tweet, posted early this morning, has had over 1.7m views but it's misleading - it's not from the current riots in France but is actually a still from a film.

BBC Verify examined the image and, searching for previous versions of it on the internet, found it was from the French film, Athena - a fictional account of rioting in a city suburb - made in 2022.

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The people in the van and the blue motorcycle are exactly the same.

The person who posted the tweet later clarified that the image was meant to be of an “illustrative” nature, but not before it had been retweeted thousands of times.

As the unrest in France continues, some false and misleading posts are being shared online with the potential to increase tensions.

BBC Verify has been looking at one video, showing a yellow Mercedes speeding along a road and overtaking a lorry. There are claims that it shows the Parisian teenager, Nahel M, driving recklessly before he was stopped by police and shot.

A tweet in French, viewed more than 230,000 times, claims: "Here is the scene that the police had to manage and which motivated them to stop the vehicle at all costs."

While the time and location of the video is unclear, it is possible to confirm that this claim is false.

BBC Verify zoomed in on the number plate of the speeding car in the online video.

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And then compared it with the number plate visible in images and videos of the yellow Mercedes - driven by the teenager - following the fatal shooting and subsequent crash in Paris.

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The two number plates are different.

In 2021, there were 37 deaths during police operations in France, 10 of whom were shot dead, according to the latest report from the police regulator IGPN.

That figure puts France at about 0.5 deaths per million people.

Countries tend to report these figures differently, so it's difficult to compare. For example, there is a question of whether the death occurred during the operation or after it.

But it's definitely considerably lower than the USA, where the figure was about 3.5 per million and Canada where it was about 1.5.

And it’s higher than England and Wales, where there were two fatal police shootings and 11 deaths in or following police custody in 2021-22. That is about 0.2 deaths per million.

The prime minister said: "There are more dentists in the NHS today -hundreds - than there were previously."

The most recent figures show that there were 539 more dentists taking NHS work in England in 2021-22 than there were the year before.

But the number of dentists in 2020-21 was down 950 compared with 2019-20.

So despite the rise last year, we are still below the number from two years ago, and it is still below the level from 2017-18.