UK Statistics Authority

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Paul O’Kane MSP – Scottish Government child poverty statistics

Dear Mr O’Kane,

Thank you for your letter expressing concern about statements made by both the current and previous Scottish First Minister that Scottish National Party (SNP) policies are “lifting” an estimated 100,000 children out of poverty.

Under the principles of intelligent transparency, it is always advisable to think how an average person would interpret a high-profile quantitative claim of this sort so as to minimise the danger of them being misled and thereby trust in similar statements being undermined.

In this instance, the First Ministers were referring to a modelled estimate of the difference between the level of relative child poverty expected in 2024/25 and the level that we would have seen in the absence of a number of policy measures (as set out in footnote 4 of the updated Cumulative Impact Assessment). The Scottish Government set out the methodology behind this comparison in an annex to its Cumulative Impact Assessment in 2022 and the 100,000 estimate comes from the update published in 2024.

This kind of analysis is a reasonable way to estimate the impact of Scottish Government policies on child poverty, even though, just like alternative estimates, the calculations are bound to be uncertain and dependent to some degree on methodological choices. But the average person hearing such a statement might well assume that the First Ministers were claiming that child poverty is 100,000 lower than when the SNP took office. And, as you point out, the Scottish Government’s official statistics on Poverty and Income Inequality in Scotland conclude that the proportion of children in Scotland living in relative and absolute poverty remains broadly stable. Comparing the number of children living in relative poverty from 2004-07 (pre-SNP) to the latest datapoint of 2020-23 shows a decrease of 10,000 children (250,000 to 240,000). For children living in absolute poverty the decrease is 40,000 children (250,000 to 210,000).

Given this potential confusion, Ministers would be well advised from time to time to accompany this type of claim with a reminder of the methodology underpinning it so that they are not suspected of making an unduly flattering comparison.

Yours sincerely,
Sir Robert Chote
Chair

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

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Lord Bailey of Paddington AM – housing statistics

Dear Lord Bailey,

Thank you for your letter to the National Statistician regarding the Mayor of London’s use of housing statistics in a LabourList article from March 2024. This was passed to the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Mayor’s comments appear to draw from the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) Affordable Housing starts and completions statistics. The statistics are broken down into house building ‘starts’ and ‘completions’. These definitions are clear and describe a real-world picture of what the statistics represent: whether a dwelling has started construction or whether construction has finished.

There were 25,658 affordable housing starts in the period April 2022 to March 2023, and 13,954 affordable housing completions during this time. The Mayor’s use of the word ‘delivered’ could be misinterpreted by the average person to mean the housing had been completed rather than started. While the Mayor would not have had access to the statistics for the equivalent period in 2023/24 at the time of writing the article, the number of affordable housing starts and completions for 2023/24 was 2,358 and 10,949 respectively. The reference to ‘within the last year’ may have been intended to reflect the latest year of statistics that were available, but this would not be clear from the statement alone.

In line with the principles of intelligent transparency, when making numerical claims, public figures should be clear what they are referring to and consider how a reasonable person would interpret the claim. To help the public understand statistical claims made during the General Election debates, the OSR has recently published a series of explainer articles including on housing supply and affordability statistics.

Yours sincerely,
Sir Robert Chote
Chair

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Karin Smyth MP – NHS waiting lists

Dear Ms Smyth,

Thank you for your letter of 10 May regarding a statement made by the Secretary of State for Health, the Rt Hon Victoria Atkins MP, who said “we’ve cut waiting lists for five months in a row”. This was made in a video posted by the Department of Health and Social Care on X on 20 April. You raised a concern that this statement appeared to overlook a change to the data collection.

The guidance on the recording and reporting of Referral to Treatment (RTT) data was updated on 2 February 2024 to say that community service pathways should, from February 2024, no longer be reported in RTT datasets and should instead be captured in community health services data collections. These changes were announced appropriately by NHS England, with the estimated impact published in an ad-hoc management information excel file. The Referral to Treatment (RTT) statistics for 2023/24 clearly indicate a break in the data series, with a dotted line appropriately separating out February and March 2024, where the changes to submitted data started.

In the statistics release, NHS England estimated that the discontinuity between January and February 2024 was ‘around 36,000’. As the reported waiting list decreased by 36,198 between end-January and end-February, this results in a small decrease of around 198 once the discontinuity is taken into account. This followed falls in each of the four months from end-September to end-January. The Secretary of State’s statement was supported by the data, but greater transparency around the discontinuity in the time period being referred to would have better supported understanding.

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

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Sarah Olney MP – statements on tax burden

Dear Ms Olney,

Thank you for your letter regarding statements by the Chancellor about changes in the tax burden. Specifically, you expressed concern that:

During his budget speech on 6 March, the Chancellor said “Today, in contrast, a Conservative Government brings down taxes”.
On 7 March, during an interview with BBC Radio Scotland, the Chancellor said Scotland “is the only part of the United Kingdom that is raising taxes”.

HM Treasury has informed us that the claims made in the budget speech were made in relation to the Spring Budget document that states,

“Together, this Spring Budget and Autumn Statement 2023 deliver a total tax cut of £20 billion for workers, the largest ever cut to employee and self-employed National Insurance Contributions (NICs), as well as making full expensing permanent – with the combined impact of government policy from Autumn Statement 2022 reducing the tax burden by 0.6 percentage points”.

In the Spring Budget document, this paragraph is clearly sourced as the combined size of Spring Budget 2023, Autumn Statement 2023, and Spring Budget 2024 tax measures in 2028/29 as a percentage of GDP, using data from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) policy measures database and the OBR public finances databank, to combine the effects from several policies at multiple fiscal events.

As you have pointed out, the OBR has also forecast that the cuts to national insurance rates will be offset by other policy decisions such as freezing national insurance and income tax thresholds. In my previous letter to you, dated 19 December 2023, I noted that intelligent transparency demands that ministers consider how someone with an interest, but little specialist knowledge, is likely to understand what they say. The average person would be likely to interpret the Chancellors’ claim to “bring down taxes” as referring to the overall tax burden.

Regarding the claims made by the Chancellor on BBC Radio Scotland, Scotland has introduced a new ‘Advanced Rate’ leading to increased tax payments for individuals earning over £75,000. However, the claim that Scotland is the only part of the United Kingdom raising taxes lacks the context of threshold freezes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

HM Treasury officials were unable to provide us with a source for this claim about Scottish taxes and did not clarify its intended meaning.

Demonstrating transparency and analytical integrity builds public confidence in how analytical evidence is used across government. The Office for Statistics Regulation is continuing to work with government departments, including HM Treasury, to embed the principles of intelligent transparency as the default approach to communicating statistics and data.

Yours sincerely,
Sir Robert Chote
Chair

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Jess Phillips MP – statements on crime

Dear Ms Phillips,

Thank you for your letter of 24 April regarding the use of crime statistics by the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, and the Home Office. You asked us to investigate the following statements about changes in the level of crime since 2010:

“Since 2010, violent crime is down 51%. Neighbourhood crime is down 48%.”
“Thanks to our record and plan, violent crime has fallen by 50%.”

These estimates of violent and neighbourhood crime come from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) headline estimates, reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The CSEW remains the best estimate of long-term trends in crimes against the household population for the crimes included in the survey.

The Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Home Office used the most appropriate data source for comparing trends in violent crime and neighbourhood crime since 2010. Nevertheless, it would support public understanding if they had been explicit in stating which offences are excluded from the violent crime estimates.

As you note, the CSEW headline estimate of violent crime incidents does not include all violent crimes. Almost all sexual offences, and all harassment and stalking offences, are not included due to the under-reporting of these crimes in face-to-face interviews and the difficulties of measuring the number of incidents that have occurred. The ONS’s preferred measure for this subset of violent crime types is the prevalence rate – the proportion of the population who have experienced such victimisation. This is estimated using data collected through separate standalone survey modules, with higher reporting rates, from those used to produce the CSEW headline estimates referred to above.

ONS’s Crime in England and Wales bulletin includes clear and prominent caveats about which crime types are excluded from the CSEW headline estimates. The ONS has also published an article titled ‘Crime trends in England and Wales and how we measure them’, which sets out how it measures crime, and which measure is best for which crime types.

Yours sincerely,
Sir Robert Chote
Chair

Paul O’Kane MSP to Sir Robert Chote – Scottish Government child poverty statistics

Dear Sir Robert

Re: Scottish Government Child Poverty Statistics

I am writing to seek the assistance of the UK Statistics Authority in establishing both the accuracy of statements made by the First Minister and former First Minister, and the methodology used by the Scottish Government, to claim that they have already, or they will lift 100,000 children out of poverty, as per the Child Poverty Cumulative Impact Assessment published by the Scottish Government on the 28th of February 2024.

On the 9th of May 2024, John Swinney claimed at First Minister’s Questions (FMQs) in the Scottish Parliament, that the SNP had ‘delivered measures such as the Scottish child payment, which is taking 100,000 children out of poverty today’. This was the second time Mr. Swinney had made this claim on that day alone.

The former First Minister, Humza Yousaf, has also made similar claims on a number of occasions, including in Parliament on the 2nd of May. Meanwhile, social media graphics and videos advertised by the SNP have promoted this claim as fact repeatedly.

According to the most recent statistics, however, child poverty rates have broadly remained static in Scotland, with approximately 240,000 Scottish children (24%) living in relative poverty. Indeed, single year statistic estimates actually suggest an increase in the number of children in poverty in 2022-23 to 260,000 children.

Given these statistics do not seem to reflect real progress on reducing child poverty, and do not correlate with claims made by SNP politicians as outlined above, Scottish Labour put in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request into the methodology and modelling used by the Scottish Government as evidence for their claims. I have attached the FOI response we received for ease of reference.

As you can see, the modelling used by the Scottish Government uses a counterfactual scenario that presumes a number of policies were not in place. Yet, the levels forecast for this counterfactual scenario are comparable to existing poverty levels, indicating that it cannot be an accurate reflection of any alternative scenario, and therefore could give an inaccurate and misleading account of the effect of Scottish Government policies.

The guidance also makes clear, contrary to some statements by SNP politicians, that this figure is an unconfirmed forecast to be reached 2024-25 and is not lifting children out of poverty but just keeping more Scottish children from going into poverty.

The guidance given to the Scottish Government explicitly states that ‘the estimated impact under this approach [the modelling used by the Scottish Government] does not equate to observable changes in poverty over time, or even… to the contribution of Scottish Government policies to those changes. For this reason, we refer to the impact of the policy package as ‘keeping’ children out of poverty rather than ‘lifting’ them out of poverty.’

You will note, as outlined in the instances mentioned above, that this advice seems to have been ignored repeatably by the First Minister and former First Minister in Parliament, and by the SNP on social media more widely.

Given both recent poverty statistics and official advice to Scottish Ministers appearing to contradict the claims of the First Minister about ‘lifting 100,000 children out of poverty’, I would welcome your view on both the language used by Scottish Government politicians, as well as the model used by the Scottish Government, which seems misleading given they compare the benefits of the policies they have implemented to an entirely unrealistic and abstract world.

I look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,
Paul O’Kane MSP
West Scotland Region
Scottish Labour Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice and Social Security, and Equalities

Karin Smyth MP to Sir Robert Chote – NHS waiting lists

Dear Sir Robert,

I am writing to you in my capacity as Shadow Health Minister, to query claims made by the Department of Health & Social Care with reference to NHS waiting list data.

In a video published to the Department of Health & Social Care’s social media accounts on 20 April, the Secretary of State stated that “we’ve cut waiting lists for five months in a row”. This claim was latterly repeated by other Health Ministers.

However, in the statistical release of RTT waiting time data published by NHSE in April, the recording of these figures was altered. The release stated that community service pathways would “no longer be reported in the RTT datasets”, and instead be captured in community health services data collections. According to the statistical release, this constituted “about 36,000 of those pathways” being excluded from February figures.

Given the reported fall in the waiting list from January to February in the RTT dataset was 36,198 – equal to the number of community service pathways removed from the figures – it appears that the claimed ‘cut’ in the waiting list could merely account for a change in the reporting method, rather than a material difference in the number of patients on incomplete pathways.

I wrote to the Department to query this matter, but their response failed to provide clarity on the data. I have attached both my letter and their reply to this email.

Can you therefore please confirm, as is my understanding, that the Secretary of State’s claim that waiting lists fell from January to February misrepresents the data? The drop in figures appears to simply reflect a change in reporting methods, rather than an actual fall in the number of patients on NHS waiting lists – as the public would understand it.

Yours sincerely,
Karin Smyth
Shadow Health Minister
Labour MP for Bristol South

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Sir Michael Ellis MP and Andrew Percy MP – Gaza statistics

Dear Sir Michael and Mr Percy,

Thank you for your letter of 25 March regarding the UK Government’s and the Opposition’s use of casualty statistics produced by the Gaza Ministry of Health related to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. You raised concerns about the accuracy of the figures produced by the Gaza Ministry of Health and the UK Government’s reliance on these figures to calculate the provision of aid to Gaza.

As you will appreciate, it is beyond our remit and our capability to assess the accuracy of casualty statistics in an overseas conflict. Tracking the number of fatalities is challenging in any conflict and there are often inaccuracies and inconsistencies in real-time reporting. There is always the potential for numbers emerging from a conflict situation to be contested, and for there to be suspicions that they reflect a particular narrative.

Given these uncertainties and potential sources of bias, it would be desirable for Ministers, Shadow Ministers and other Parliamentarians to state the source of any estimates they use in the public domain and to recognise the limitations attached to them.

As regards determining aid provision, the Leader of the House of Commons explained in the House of Commons on 21 March 2024 that the Government uses satellite imagery of building damage, information from humanitarian partners on the ground and data on living conditions as well as casualty estimates. Transparency around the information feeding into such judgements can help establish confidence in the robustness of the decisions taken; however, there are clearly obstacles to providing that for some sources in a conflict situation with lives at risk.

Yours sincerely,
Sir Robert Chote
Chair

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Paul O’Kane MSP – Scottish Government child poverty statistics

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