Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

BBC Verify carries out fact-checking while Prime Minister’s Questions is taking place in the House of Commons. I’ve been speaking to senior journalist Tamara Kovacevic about what they do.

How do you prep ahead of PMQs?

We try to fact-check claims
made at PMQs as quickly as possible and the
key to being able to do that is preparing in advance. We try to identify which
topics might come up and what specific claims might be made by the prime minister and the
leader of the opposition. We look at what the evidence is for each claim,
including what we can find from publicly available data.

How do you identify what the likely topics are going to be?

We check for claims that Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have made on social media or in recent interviews, we stay across party press releases and other announcements and we also talk to our colleagues in Westminster. In the past week there has been plenty of talk about the government’s defence strategy and the numbers of people arriving in the UK on small boats, so we’ll be preparing for questions about those.

How is the team assigned?

Today we have a team of four who will all listen to PMQs and post claims in our internal chat as we hear them. Once we decide which claims to check – wrong or misleading ones are the priority – we’ll listen back to double check the exact wording to quote. The journalist who prepared that topic in advance will write the post and the editor will check it and sign off before publication.

What is the most challenging aspect of it all?

There are often claims that are not clearly wrong or right. We also get claims we haven’t prepared for. We have to work at speed to check them against all the available information and – if we can’t find any evidence for the claim – we may have to contact the politician who made it to ask them for their sources.