Senior United Kingdom Public Servants and Ministers have been criticised for failing to provide evidence for claims allegedly supported by statistics and not correcting errors once they had been established.
The annual report of fact-checking charity, Full Fact highlighted the Home Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, and officials at the Prime Minister’s Office with calls for change in attitudes to boost the quality of information provided to the public.
Full Fact said that in 2022 as many as 50 Members of Parliament, including two Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers and Opposition front benchers, failed to correct false, un-evidenced or misleading claims, despite its requests to do so.
It said 2022 had been a “damaging year for standards in public debate” and urged Permanent Secretaries to take a keener interest in ensuring data and other supporting information was available to evidence claims made by Ministers and their Departments.
High-profile concerns flagged by Full Fact included claims related to migrant-boat crossings of the English Channel made last year by then-Home Secretary, Priti Patel and Minister for Immigration, Robert Jenrick.
The report gave examples that either turned out to have been incorrect or remained unsubstantiated, prompting the Office for Statistics Regulation to intervene.
Full Fact said a September claim made by Ms Patel in Parliament that the majority of arrivals in small boats from France were Albanian nationals had not been backed up by Home Office data and was subsequently shown to be wrong in a Freedom of Information Act response.
It said assertions made by Mr Jenrick (pictured) about the true ages of asylum seekers arriving at one asylum-processing centre had not been supported by any published Home Office figures, and that the situation had not been rectified.
A false claim about employment levels that was made by then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and repeated multiple times was also referenced by Full Fact.
It said the claim that 500,000 more people were in work following the COVID-19 pandemic than had been before, remained uncorrected despite numerous challenges.
In fact, there were 588,000 fewer people in work than there had been two years earlier.
London, 27 March 2023
