Round-up of fact checks from the last few days compiled by Full Fact.
This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact-checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Is the Government delivering on its immigration returns pledge?
In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour said it would “set up a new returns and enforcement unit, with an additional 1,000 staff, to fast-track removals to safe countries for people who have no right to stay here”.
We have been monitoring the delivery of this pledge via our Government Tracker, which is now following 92 promises made by Labour in its manifesto or since it entered office. As of last month we were rating the pledge as “Unclear or disputed”, because we simply had not been able to ascertain whether a new unit had been created, despite repeatedly asking the Home Office.
However we now know that ministers have decided not to establish a separate new immigration returns and enforcement unit, after the Government responded to a Full Fact freedom of information request.
The Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement Secretariat told us the Government had “established a new returns and enforcement programme”, adding: “Returns and enforcement activity falls to various parts of the Home Office, and in particular to Immigration Enforcement, Visas, Passports, Citizenship and Resettlement Services, Asylum Group and the Border Security Command.
“Ministers decided to enhance those existing capabilities rather than establish a separate unit, and in light of that decision, I can confirm that the Home Office redeployed the equivalent of 1,000 full-time staff from across the department to increase delivery of the Government’s returns and enforcement priorities.”
In light of this response, and the fact the Government has decided not to establish a separate immigration returns and enforcement unit, our Government Tracker is now rating this pledge as “Not kept”.
Despite no new unit being established, the number of immigration returns has increased since Labour entered Government, however.
Between July 1 2024 and January 31 2026, 58,539 returns (both voluntary and enforced) took place – a 31% increase on the previous 19-month period.
Dr Mihnea Cuibus, researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, told Full Fact: “Staffing has increased under the current Government and this may be one factor behind the increase in returns in 2024/25.
“However, it is hard to know how much of the increase results from higher resources, especially since returns numbers were already on an upwards trajectory before Labour was elected.”
He also told us: “Enforcement resources appear to matter, but we are not aware of any reason to believe that a new unit was necessary to increase returns.”
It is not clear exactly when ministers decided not to establish a new unit. On July 17 2024, shortly after Labour took office, a Government press release said a “new returns and enforcement unit” was being set up in the Home Office. The term “returns and enforcement unit” does not seem to have appeared on the Government’s website since, although it was used in a minister’s response to a written question in March 2025.
Last week we asked the Labour Party and the Home Office for further information on why ministers decided not to establish a separate unit, but have not received a response.
Miscaptioned video does not show Dubai airport ‘in flames’
An old video of a fire at a market in the UAE has been circulating on social media alongside misleading captions suggesting it shows Dubai’s international airport “up in flames”.
The clip, which has been shared on Facebook and X, appears to be filmed from a moving vehicle and shows a building on fire and a large cloud of black smoke filling the sky.
We traced the same video to a Facebook post from August 2020, with a caption in Nepali which (translated to English) said: “Massive fire breaks out in Ajman, Dubai.”
Other clips shared around the same time showed shots of the fire, which was reported as having engulfed a public market in the industrial area of Ajman in the UAE.
The road in the clip also matches Google Street View imagery of a street in Ajman, which is around 12 miles from Dubai International Airport.
However, it is true that drone strikes from Iran have been targeting the airport, with reports of aircraft sustaining damage and at least one fire having broken out as a result.
Since the outbreak of war in the Middle East we have seen a surge of misinformation on social media, particularly miscaptioned videos and AI images. For more on the false and misleading claims circulating, see our round-up of Middle East conflict fact checks.
Full Fact also has a toolkit with practical tips anyone can use to identify bad information, as well as specific guides on how to spot misleading images online, how to fact check misleading videos and how a fact checker spots if something is AI.
