Rishi Sunak's five promises: What progress has he made? - BBC News
In January the prime minister said five priorities should be used to hold his government to account.
On 4 January, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out his five priorities for 2023.

"I fully expect you to hold my government and I to account on delivering those goals," he said.

What progress has been made?

The government's top priority is halving inflation - the increase in prices over time - by the end of 2023.

Inflation was at 10.7% in the three-month period between October and December 2022, so the aim was to reduce inflation to 5.3% or lower in the last three months of 2023.

The government is using a measure called the Consumer Prices Index, which tracks the price of a typical basket of goods.

The monthly inflation figure for the year to October was 4.6%, with the fall largely due to lower energy prices.

At this point, the government said it had met its target early, without having to wait for the final quarter figure.

The rate of inflation fell further to 3.9% in the year to November.

When the prime minister made the pledge, many experts already expected inflation to drop sharply. However, it did not fall as quickly as anticipated at the beginning of the year.

When will we know? The figure for the fourth quarter of 2023 will be released on 17 January 2024.

Downing Street said the pledge to "grow the economy" will be met if the economy is bigger in the three-month period of October to December 2023 than it was in the previous quarter (July-September).

It is using GDP (or Gross Domestic Product), a measure of all the activity of companies, governments and individuals.

This would not normally be seen as a difficult pledge to meet, because the UK's economy is usually growing.

But the latest monthly figures for October show that the economy has been flat in 2023.

And, in November, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which assesses the health of the UK's economy, cut its growth forecasts to 0.7% in 2024 and 1.4% in 2025.

The pledge to grow the economy has been made more difficult by the government's promise to halve inflation.

The Bank of England put up interest rates 14 times to stop prices rising so quickly.

However, this also reduces spending, and slows economic growth.

When will we know? GDP for the fourth quarter of 2023 will be published on 13 February 2024.

When governments talk about debt falling, they almost always mean as a proportion of GDP.

The idea is that debt is falling if it is growing more slowly than the economy.

But debt is not currently falling - it is rising. The latest figures for October showed that government debt stood at 97.8% of the size of the economy.

That was 2.3 percentage points higher than October 2022 and, as the Office for National Statistics pointed out, "remains at levels last seen in the early 1960s".

But the government pledge wasn't about how much debt is today - it was that debt would be forecast to come down in five years (2028-29).

In the Autumn Statement in November, the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt claimed to be on track to meet that pledge because the OBR predicted a fall in 2028-29.

But it's going to be tight and will involve challenging spending restraint for some government departments.

In December, the statistics regulator criticised the prime minister for saying debt was falling when it was actually rising, as BBC Verify also pointed out.

When will we know? The next debt forecasts will be published alongside the Spring Budget in 2024.

Mr Sunak said: "NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly."

His pledge only refers to waiting lists in England, because Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland manage their own health systems.

The overall number of waits for non-emergency treatment in England was 7.71 million in October. This was about 40,000 down from September, but almost half a million higher than it was at the start of the year.

On a visit to a hospital in September, Mr Sunak conceded that his target was in doubt, saying it was "very hard". He said it would have been met without ongoing NHS industrial action.

But research by the Health Foundation think tank suggested that industrial action by consultants and junior doctors had only lengthened the waiting list by around 210,000, which is 3% of the list.

The NHS target is to see people within 18 weeks for non-urgent consultant-led treatment.

When we asked Downing Street when the prime minister aimed to have waiting lists falling, we were pointed towards the plan for tackling the backlog of elective care (care planned in advance). This said the overall waiting list was expected to be falling by about March 2024.

When will we know?: March's figures should be out in May.

The final priority was to "stop the boats" which bring people across the English Channel, after 45,755 migrants crossed over from France that way in 2022.

Mr Sunak has said that his plan to tackle small boat crossings is "starting to work".

As at 16 December, 29,437 people had been detected crossing the English Channel in 2023, according to the Home Office, which is down a third from the same date in 2022.

When will we know? Figures on arrivals in small boats are collected daily.