Fact-check: Will Labour really save the average family £6,700 a year?

John McDonnell claimed in a speech in Birmingham today that the Labour party’s plans to expand free childcare, cut rail ticket prices, and introduce free prescriptions and free school meals, along with various other measures, would save the average family £6,700 a year.

Given how much Labour had allocated for these promises in the costings document accompanying its manifesto, I immediately suspected that their figures would not add up. But having seen the Labour dossier which costs this claim, it is impossible to stress – even by the standards of modern politics – how shoddy these numbers are and how quickly they fall apart.

This document comes in two parts, the ‘cost of the Tories’ and ‘savings under Labour’. You can see the summary here:

The first and most important point to make is that Labour’s household is nothing like the UK average household. This is a ‘household’ in which two working parents are rich enough to both commute into London (or another big city), pay for their own NHS prescriptions and receive zero state help with childcare.