Rishi Sunak's five promises: What progress has he made?

On 4 January 2023, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out his five priorities.

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

What progress has he made?

The government's top priority was 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 CPI for the last three months of 2023 was 4.2%, comfortably below half the rate it was the year before - so the government has met this pledge.

Downing Street said its pledge to "grow the economy" would be met if the economy was 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 November show that there has been very little growth in 2023.

The quarterly figures showed the economy grew 0.3% in the first three months of 2023, had zero growth in the next three months and shrank 0.1% between July and September.

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 15 February 2024.

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

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

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.

The latest figures for December showed that government debt stood at 97.7% of the size of the economy.

That was 1.9 percentage points higher than December 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 now - 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.

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 7.6 million in December. This was the fourth monthly fall in a row and about 140,000 down from August, but about 600,000 higher than it was in December 2022.

The prime minister was asked in an interview on TalkTV on 5 February 2024 whether his government had failed to achieve his pledge, Mr Sunak said: "Yes, we have."

He highlighted the level of NHS spending and said: "All these things mean the NHS is doing more than it ever has but industrial action has had an impact."

Research by the Health Foundation think tank suggested that industrial action by consultants and junior doctors had lengthened the waiting list by around 210,000.

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.

The prime minister proposed to do this through new legislation. The government finally passed its Illegal Migration Bill on 17 July, giving the home secretary a legal duty to detain and remove anyone entering the UK illegally.

The plan included sending some asylum seekers to Rwanda but this was blocked by the Supreme Court.

In response, the government signed a new treaty with Rwanda and proposed new UK laws declaring that Rwanda is a safe country. The new legislation passed through the House of Commons and moved to the House of Lords at the end of January 2024.

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

In the whole of 2023, 29,437 people were detected crossing the English Channel, according to the Home Office, which is down more than a third from the previous year.

In 2024, 1506 people had been detected crossing by 10 February, which was down about a quarter from the same period last year.

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

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?