What Is Did They Deliver?
Did They Deliver is an independent, non-partisan UK political accountability tracker. We track key pledges made by every UK Prime Minister since 1997 — from Tony Blair to Keir Starmer — and categorise each as Kept, Broken, or Partial based on publicly verifiable data from official sources.
We are not affiliated with any political party, campaign group, trade union, or media organisation. We accept no political advertising and apply no editorial framing to the statistics we present. The data either supports a pledge or it does not.
Why We Built This
Political accountability in the UK suffers from a fundamental problem: voters are asked to remember and evaluate promises made years earlier, often without access to independent, cross-referenced data. Governments of all parties have exploited this memory gap. Did They Deliver exists to close it.
We believe that holding power to account is not a partisan act. It is a civic one. A Conservative PM who breaks a promise should be held to the same standard as a Labour PM who does the same. The data, not the party, determines the verdict.
How We Select Pledges
We track pledges that meet at least one of the following criteria: the pledge was made in a general election manifesto; the pledge was made explicitly in a public speech, interview, or policy document during the campaign or early in the PM's tenure; the pledge is specific and measurable enough to be objectively verified.
We do not track vague aspirations or statements of intent that cannot be verified against data. "We want a fairer society" is not a pledge. "We will cut NHS waiting times to 18 weeks" is.
How We Classify a Pledge
We do not use the Broken classification for pledges that were abandoned due to genuinely unforeseeable external events, unless the PM continued to maintain the pledge was achievable when evidence clearly showed otherwise. Intellectual honesty cuts both ways.
Data Sources
All data used by Did They Deliver is sourced from publicly available official records. We do not use polling companies, party-commissioned research, or advocacy group data as primary sources. Our primary sources are:
- Office for National Statistics (ONS) — inflation, migration, GDP, employment, house prices
- NHS England — Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting list data, A&E performance, staffing
- Parliament.uk / Hansard — voting records, written statements, official pledges
- HM Treasury — fiscal data, budget documents, OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlooks
- Bank of England — interest rates, inflation reports, monetary policy committee decisions
- Home Office — immigration statistics, asylum data, small boat crossing figures
- National Audit Office (NAO) — value for money assessments, programme delivery reports
- Major public inquiries — Chilcot Iraq Inquiry, Grenfell Tower Inquiry, COVID Inquiry
Where we use secondary reporting (e.g. a Guardian or BBC article citing official data), we link to the underlying official source wherever possible. If you believe a source is incorrect or outdated, please use the contact details below.
What We Are Not
We are not a fact-checking organisation in the sense of adjudicating political claims in real time. We do not investigate individual speeches or press releases. We focus on trackable, official-data-backed pledges with clear before/after comparisons.
We are not a news organisation. We do not report breaking political stories. The headlines on our dashboard are pulled from external news sources via RSS and represent the editorial choices of those outlets — not ours.
We are not affiliated with any think tank, university, or research institute, though we draw on published research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the King's Fund, and the Resolution Foundation where they provide independent analysis of official data.
Political Neutrality — In Practice
Neutrality is harder than it sounds. No website that tracks "broken promises" is truly neutral — the framing itself implies criticism. We have tried to mitigate this in several ways:
- We track every PM since 1997, across both Labour and Conservative governments, using the same methodology
- We note when a pledge outcome had causes outside government control (e.g. COVID, global commodity prices)
- We mark pledges as Kept when the evidence supports this, even when the political context is critical of the PM
- Our site title is a question — "Did They Deliver?" — not an assertion
- We do not editorially characterise any pledge as "stupid" or "dishonest" — we present the data and let readers draw their own conclusions
If you believe a pledge has been misclassified, or that our framing favours one party over another, we want to hear from you. Our methodology should be challengeable.
Privacy & Data
This website uses Google Analytics 4 with IP anonymisation enabled. We collect anonymised usage data (pages visited, approximate location, device type) to understand how the site is used and improve it. We do not sell or share this data.
If you sign up to our newsletter, your email address is stored securely by our form provider and used only to send you the Did They Deliver weekly briefing. You can unsubscribe at any time from any email we send.
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Contact
Did They Deliver is an independent project. If you have corrections, data disputes, or press enquiries, you can reach us via the contact link in the footer. We aim to respond within five working days.
If you spot a factual error — incorrect source, misclassified pledge, or outdated figure — please tell us. Accuracy matters more to us than being right.