True or false? Howard's claims right on tax, but not on health

Not really. Official statistics express truancy by the percentage of half-days missed, a figure that has remained broadly static at 0.7% since 1995. The only hint of an increase is probably due to the fact that in 2002-03, the figure was measured to two decimal points for the first time. The following year the figure rose from 0.70% to 0.72% - an increase of approximately 2,000 pupils, according to DfES estimates.

On tax, Michael Howard has a point. The main rise was the 1% increase in national insurance in 2003, earmarked to finance the surge of NHS spending. The Treasury's own figures show that the "tax take" as a percentage of national income has risen sharply in the past couple of years and will continue to do so to the end of the decade.

Pensions are undoubtedly down. The combined impact of a fall in the stock market, in which many pension funds are invested, and Mr Brown's ending of the dividend tax credit are to blame. A fall in annuity rates because of lower inflation and interest rates has also cut pension payouts.

But take home pay depends on the measure used. One shows take home pay fell 0.2% in 2003-04 from the year before, another shows it rose 0.5%. What is most accurate to say is that it has stopped rising for the first time since the early 1990s recession.

Half true. There are two sets of official crime figures: crime reported to and recorded by the police, and the British Crime Survey, which measures people's experience of crime. In fact the latest quarterly figures show that crime is falling on both measures - down 6% on police recorded crime and by 11% on the BCS in 2003-04. The risk of becoming a victim is now the lowest for 20 years.

But detection rates are going in the wrong direction and have fallen by 1.7% in the last year to only 18.7% of recorded offences. In 2001 the then home secretary David Blunkett described a national detection rate of 24% as "appalling".

True, but not necessarily to be seen as a punishable offence.

In 2003, 180,000 people, including their immediate families, from outside the EU came to Britain to work on managed migration schemes. This was 30,000 more than in 2001 and 55,000 more than in 1997. No official estimate exists for the scale of illegal migration. New citizenship applications are running at about 125,000 a year.

But the number of asylum seekers is sharply down. New applications for asylum in Britain peaked at 9,000 a month in October 2002 with 82,000 arriving in total in 2002. Repeated clampdowns have more than halved the number of new arrivals. Applications are now running at 2,700 a month with the annual total for 2004 falling to 33,930.

The Department of Health's "hospital episode statistics" show the average wait increased from 90 days in 1999-2000 to 95 days in 2003-04.

But more commonly quoted statistics show waiting times are down. The maximum for non-emergency inpatient treatment in England fell from more than 18 months in 1997 to under 12 months, with a target maximum of six months due to be reached by the end of this year.

The King's Fund, an independent health thinktank, said the mean average wait also fell, from just over four months in March 1997 to just under three months by March 2004.

His claim on MRSA is likely to hit a nerve with the public. The Office for National Statistics figures for England suggested 955 deaths linked to the superbug in 2003, compared with 487 in 1999. A Health Protection Agency study based on England and Wales last year suggested deaths totalled 800 in 2002, against 51 in 1993.