In an LBC interview on Saturday, the GB News presenter and former Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin claimed that the UK spends millions of pounds on contraception in Pakistan. When the host questioned this, Mr Goodwin asked for the claim to be fact checked.
A clip of the interview has been widely shared online, including by the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage. And as professional fact checkers, we’re happy to help.
At the start of the exchange, Mr Goodwin said:
Later, Mr Goodwin searched for the figure on his phone and said:
This £74.3 million figure does correctly reflect the maximum funding allocated to a contraception programme, although it represents total projected spending over about a decade, not annually.
Where do the numbers come from?
We’ve emailed Mr Goodwin to ask for the source he was using, but it seems likely he was reading from a Guido Fawkes blog published in October 2025, which begins with the words he quoted, and also cites a figure of £74.3 million being spent to “promote the sale of branded contraceptives”.
However, as the blog says, this money is allocated as part of a wider scheme—Delivering Accelerated Family Planning in Pakistan (DAFPAK)—that “began in 2017 [and] runs until 2028”. And the government’s own data confirms this, saying the figure for this component of the project is “up to £74.3 million”.
The total spend to date on the entire programme, which also includes other components such as research and technical support, is £96.2 million.
A government assessment claims that by 30 June 2024, the programme had reached 10.8 million family planning users, and that this had “averted 5,412 maternal deaths, 7.11 million unintended pregnancies and 2.31 million unsafe abortions nationwide”, although we’ve not verified these estimates ourselves.
Fact checking can take time
Checking your sources when they’re in doubt is exactly the right thing to do, and we applaud Mr Goodwin for that. But this can be difficult during a live interview.
In this instance Mr Goodwin was right that the UK government funds a project to promote the sale of contraceptives in Pakistan costing millions of pounds a year. But his initial claim that “over £100 million” is spent “every year” was not correct.
And while he did correct the £100 million figure mid-interview, he did not specify that the sum in question is being spent over about a decade, so this may not have been clear to some listeners. Following the interview a number of posts on social media referred to £74 million as the amount spent every year—although we can’t know for sure whether they got the figure from Mr Goodwin’s interview.
We approached Mr Goodwin, Mr Farage and LBC for comment.
