What they said they'd do. What it actually cost.
What they said they'd do. What they actually did. What it cost you. Every promise checked against the official receipt, and the ones they kept are here too.
10 figures, each with its official source.
Promise: a full London–Birmingham–Manchester–Leeds network within £55.7bn (2015 prices). Receipt: only London–Birmingham survives, at up to £102.7bn in cash prices, roughly double the 2020 Phase One estimate, with trains not reaching Euston until 2040–43.
Promise (Apr 2022): remove tens of thousands to Rwanda to deter crossings. Receipt (Home Office's own accounting): £715m spent, including £290m paid to Rwanda, largely non-recoverable, and 'only four volunteers and no asylum seekers were sent' before the scheme was scrapped in July 2024. Cancelling saved £220m+ in future payments.
Promise (2019/20): 40 new hospitals by 2030. Receipt: the official review found 'there were not 40 of them, they were not all new and many were not even hospitals', with funding due to run out in March 2025, the programme was reset into waves running to 2039, backed by ~£3bn a year.
Promise vs receipt across parties: the 2010–2019 'tens of thousands' target was never met, and net migration peaked at ~906,000 (YE Jun 2023) after the 2019 pledge to bring numbers down. It has since nearly halved year-on-year to 171,000, a real fall, driven mainly by a 47% drop in non-EU work-related arrivals.
Promise: initial operating capability by July 2020. Receipt: IOC finally declared November 2025, then training was suspended after 33 soldiers reported noise/vibration symptoms on exercise; PAC (Jun 2026) warns full operating capability remains uncertain on the £5.522bn firm-price contract for 589 vehicles.
Promise: all-lane-running motorways would add capacity safely. Receipt: after years of safety concerns all 14 planned schemes were cancelled (avoiding £1bn+ of construction), while £900m is spent retrofitting 150 emergency areas and stopped-vehicle detection to the ones already built. Two part-built schemes were finished anyway.
INDUSTRY SURVEY, not an official statistic (routinely cited by the Commons Library; DfT's own stats track surface condition, not a backlog cost). Promise: 'fix the potholes', incl. an extra £500m/yr from 2025. Receipt: a record reported backlog despite a 17% budget rise, local roads resurfaced on average once every 97 years.
Promise (2011, kept by every government since): pension rises by the highest of earnings, inflation or 2.5%. Receipt: a pledge being KEPT, at three times the £5.2bn/yr advertised price (cost measured relative to earnings uprating), which the OBR calls a large and growing fiscal risk. The pension itself cost ~£138bn in 2024-25.
Promise (Jul 2024): 'smash the gangs' via the Border Security Command to cut crossings. Receipt: crossings rose 13% in 2025, the second-highest year on record (9% below the 2022 peak), the official measure moved the wrong way in the policy's first full year. 2026 so far is running below the 2025 pace.
Promise (2024 manifesto): 2 million extra appointments a year within the first year. Receipt: MET, seven months early, on NHS England activity data, included as the honest counterweight; not every pledge fails. Analysts note 2m is a small share of total elective activity.