Conservative Party

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Rt Hon Richard Holden – party spending claims

Dear Mr Holden,

Thank you for your letter of 6 June regarding the Labour Party’s analysis of Conservative Party commitments and its own plans.

In my recent letter to political parties, I asked that parties and candidates use statistics appropriately and transparently during this general election campaign and made clear why these expectations are in the interests of the public and those campaigning. These expectations were echoed in a statement published by the Office for Statistics Regulation regarding the claim that “a Labour government would mean £2,000 of tax rises per working household”. Many of the principles set out in that statement apply also to the claim you highlight, that the Conservatives have “£71 billion of unfunded spending plans”.

This figure derives from Labour’s 25 May document Conservatives’ Interest Rate Rise which sets out their costings of nine future ‘policy decisions’ and refers to roughly £71 billion of net extra spending in fiscal year 2029-30. In another document, Tory Manifesto Costings published on 13 June, the Labour Party claimed that Conservative manifesto plans would amount to net extra spending of roughly £71 billion over the next five fiscal years put together and “raise people’s mortgages by £4,800” cumulatively over that period.

Future costings are always subject to uncertainty and dependent on choice of methodology. To help people understand the assumptions that have gone into costing models, it is essential that the underlying calculations, data sources and context are provided alongside the figures. When distilling these claims into a single number, there should be enough context to allow the average person to understand what it means and how significant it is. Omitting this information can damage trust in the data and the claims that these data inform.

To safeguard trust in official statistics, we encourage that statistical claims are presented clearly and transparently so that the public can test the arguments, and descriptive statements, that political candidates make about them.

Yours sincerely,
Sir Robert Chote
Chair

Rt Hon Richard Holden to Sir Robert Chote – party spending claims

Dear Sir Robert,

LABOUR PARTY ECONOMIC CLAIMS

I am writing to express my serious concerns about the Labour Party’s misleading economic analysis following a series of incorrect claims about the Conservative Party’s commitments and Labour’s own plans.

In relation to the Conservatives plans, Labour published a document on 29 May 2024 claiming that the Conservatives had unfunded plans of £71 billion a year in the next Parliament. Senior
members of the Shadow Cabinet have subsequently repeatedly used the number in media interviews.

For example, on 29 May 2024, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones held a press conference repeating the figure. This was parroted by the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves on the same day to The Sun Newspaper, stating: “Jeremy Hunt needs to explain how he is going to fund his £71 billion unfunded spending plans”.

This week, Shadow Paymaster General Jonathan Ashworth repeated the figure in seven different media interviews.

The document included numerous assumptions about Conservative policy which were deliberately misleading, including that the Conservative Party planned to:

Scrap national insurance on 1 April 2025
Abolish inheritance tax on 1 April 2025
Scrap green levies on 1 April 2025

Given these are not, and never have been, Conservative Party policy, please can you confirm that using the £71 billion figure publicly is misleading, and that Labour figures should cease to use it?

In addition, both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have repeatedly said that their plans do not involve raising taxes on working people.

For example, on 5 June 2024 Rachel Reeves said on the BBC that “Labour has no plans to increase taxes on working people”. On the same day, Keir Starmer said “it’s important that I get across that we will not be raising tax on working people”.

However, Labour has committed to levy VAT on private schools. This is a tax that would clearly be paid by working parents. Can you therefore please confirm that it is misleading for Labour to say it has no plans to raise tax on working people?

I look forward to hearing from you.

THE RT HON RICHARD HOLDEN
CHAIRMAN OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

Response from Sian Jones to Andrew Gwynne MP – statistics on surveillance of COVID-19 vaccines

Dear Mr Gwynne,

Thank you for your letter about figures on adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccinations used by Sir Christopher Chope MP in a Parliamentary debate.

There is no basis in the official statistics on the COVID-19 vaccine programme to support the claim that vaccines have caused such a high number of severe adverse reactions or deaths. The available evidence suggests that severe side effects are very rare, and indeed much rarer than serious complications from COVID-19 itself. We have asked Sir Christopher’s office for information on the source that he was using. In the meantime, you may find some of the sources below helpful.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes monthly data on deaths in England and Wales¹. Table 12 records 27 deaths between March 2020 and March 2022 where “COVID-19 vaccines causing adverse effects in therapeutic use, unspecified” was the underlying cause of death, and a further six deaths where this cause was mentioned at all.

The Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) publishes a weekly summary of ‘Yellow Card’ reports², which is the scheme by which any member of the public or health professional can notify suspected side effects from around the time a COVID-19 vaccine was given. As you say, MHRA makes clear in its report that the number of Yellow Cards is not an estimate of the prevalence of vaccine side effects. MHRA has a strategy for monitoring the safety of COVID-19 vaccines³, one strand of which involves using data from Yellow Cards to identify possible side effects for further investigation. This work is described further in the report, which concludes that the expected benefits of the vaccines in preventing COVID-19 and serious complications associated with COVID-19 far outweigh any currently known side effects in the majority of patients.

I am copying this letter to Sir Christopher.

Yours sincerely,

Sian Jones
Interim Chair of the UK Statistics Authority

1 Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales, ONS, 27 April 2022

2 Coronavirus vaccine – weekly summary of Yellow Card reporting, MHRA, 28 April 2022

3 Report of the Commission on Human Medicines Expert Working Group on COVID-19 vaccine safety surveillance, MHRA, 5 February 2021

Andrew Gwynne MP to Sir David Norgrove – statistics on surveillance of COVID-19 vaccines

Dear Sir David,

I am writing to raise concerns over recent comments made in Parliament by Sir Christopher Chope, Member of Parliament for Christchurch.

In a recent question on the 31st of March during Cabinet Office Questions, Mr Chope stated that “there is another NHS treatment disaster in the making, in the fact that there may be 10,000 or more people who have suffered serious injury or even death as a result of adverse reactions to the Covid-19 vaccinations”.

The Covid-19 vaccination programme has saved countless lives and enabled us to reclaim many liberties which we were forced to forfeit over the course of the pandemic. Mr Chope’s claim is baseless and extremely dangerous.

Recent data included in the UKHSA’s Covid-19 vaccine surveillance report shows that the rates of death concerning Covid-19 are consistently lower for the triple-vaccinated in all age groups in comparison to the unvaccinated. Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective, and reports of serious side effects are very rare. To quote these misleading statistics in the House of Commons Chamber is therefore profoundly
irresponsible.

I am unsure as to where Mr Chope has generated these false figures from, but it seems that he has either inadvertently or deliberately misrepresented Yellow Card Data, which cannot be relied on to calculate a fair estimate of the number of genuine severe Covid-19 vaccine side effects.

I am sure that you will agree that Members of Parliament have a duty to use statistics – particularly those related to public health – accurately and in a manner that reflects the influence of an elected representative. I therefore request that you investigate Mr Chope’s statement and would welcome your view on his remarks.

Kind regards,

Andrew Gwynne

Shadow Minister for Public Health