BBC News Reality Check

Boris Johnson faced lots of question today on defence spending - in PMQs and in his session with the Liaison Committee.

The prime minister said recent spending pledges were “the biggest investment in defence since the Cold War.”

Looking back at figures since 1990 - seen by many as the end of the Cold War, with the Berlin Wall coming down in November 1989 - it is clear military spending has fallen considerably.

The proportion of the gross domestic product (GDP), which is the value of everything produced by the economy in any particular year, was 3.5% in 1990 . It was 2.1% in 2018/19.

The boost announced in November means by 2024-25, defence spending will be £7bn a year higher than it would have been under previous plans.

But with £7bn worth about 0.35% of GDP, this extra money is not enough to push defence spending above the 3.5% of GDP it represented in 1990.

The government has previously phrased this claim differently, though, calling the boost that will see defence spending rise by £7bn a year by 2024-25, the "biggest sustained increase in 30 years".

And as defence spending has not increased for more than three years in a row since 1990, this will probably turn out to be true.

Read more here.

The PM was asked about the row about vaccine exports from the EU.

But what is it all about?

The European Union (EU) has said it could block exports of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab to the UK, amid claims current arrangements are slowing down its own vaccine rollout.

The EU has been criticised for the pace of its vaccination programme - only 14% of its population have received the jab, compared with 45% in the UK.

Read more here

With the PM due to face questions from the Liaison Committee about the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic and the economy, could they ask him about NHS pay?

Once again at PMQs, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer clashed over pay increases for NHS staff.

Starmer said that “nurses are getting a pay cut".

Recently, the government recommended that NHS staff, including nurses, should receive a 1% pay increase in the upcoming year.

But this is not the final decision and an independent pay review body will now look at evidence supplied by the government as well as other bodies, such as unions and employers.

Most other public sector employees will have their pay frozen this year due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

Whilst a 1% pay increase would be an increase in cash terms, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that inflation will rise to 1.5% this year. So a below inflation pay increase means their salary will be worth less.

The prime minister responded by saying the government had “increased their starting salary by 12.8%".

It is true that between 2018 and 2021, a nurse's starting salary increased by that much as part of a three-year pay deal, but this figure doesn’t account for inflation.

It also ignores the fact that a decade of pay caps and freezes means that, once we account for inflation, a nurses starting salary is actually worth about 3% less than in 2010.

At PMQs earlier, Labour leader Keir Starmer raised Monday’s announcement of a reduction to the size of the Army, saying Boris Johnson had promised at the last election not to cut the armed forces “in any form”.

He’s right – in November 2019, at the launch of the Conservative manifesto - when answering questions after his speech - Mr Johnson said: “We will not be cutting our armed services in any form – we will be maintaining the size of our armed services”.

This was reported by several papers, including The Sun, which also included the video of Mr Johnson saying it.

But that promise wasn’t in the 2019 Conservative manifesto.

On Monday, the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced that: “I have therefore taken the decision to reduce the size of the Army from today’s current strength of 76,500 trade trained personnel to 72,500 by 2025”.

In his reply to Mr Starmer, the prime minister spoke of increased defence spending. There was a pledge in the 2019 manifesto to “increase the [defence] budget by at least 0.5 per cent above inflation every year of the new Parliament”.

The spending plan for the Ministry of Defence announced last November will achieve that on average until 2025, based on inflation forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.