IPSO upholds Department of Health complaint against Mirror:

The Department of Health and Social Care complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that the Daily Mirror breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in an article headlined “You’re off your trolley”, published on 9 February 2018.

The Complaint was upheld, and the Daily Mirror has been required to publish this ruling as a remedy to the breach of the Code.

The newspaper had published a frontpage headline describing Mr Hunt as “off [his] trolley” and “arrogant”. These claims related to an exchange Mr Hunt had had with a TV reporter in which, it reported, he had “refuse[d] to apologise for NHS inability to cope with [the] worst winter ever as cuts bite”, and had “told staff they ‘knew what they were signing up for’”.

The complainant said that the newspaper misrepresented the exchange. It said Mr Hunt’s actual response to a question on the pressure staff were under was: “when they signed up to go into medicine, they knew there would be pressurised moments. But, I also recognise it’s not sustainable and not fair to say to them this is going to be repeated year in year out”.

In addition, the complainant said that when asked whether he would apologise to NHS staff, Mr Hunt said “I apologise to patients when we haven’t delivered the care that we should”. It said the article’s claim that he had refused to apologise was therefore inaccurate.

The newspaper denied any inaccuracy. It said that Mr Hunt could only have meant by his comments that the type of pressure staff were under was the pressure that they signed up for. It said that the article would be understood as reporting that Mr Hunt had refused to apologise to staff, which it said was accurate; Mr Hunt made it very clear that he was not going to apologise to staff, when he was invited to do so.

IPSO found that Mr Hunt had not refused to apologise for the “NHS[’s] inability to cope with the worst winter ever”; this question had not been put to him. Further, while he had not responded to the journalist’s invitation to apologise to NHS staff, he had in fact offered an apology: he had apologised to patients who had received substandard care.

Second, his reference to staff knowing what they were signing up for related to “pressurised moments”; he had immediately qualified this by saying that “I also recognise it’s not sustainable and not fair to say to them this is going to be repeated year in year out”.

These claims about Mr Hunt’s comments were used as the basis for personal criticism of his position and IPSO decided it was therefore a significant and prominent failure to take care not to publish distorted comments, and a breach of Clause 1 of the Code. Although this was not a case where the newspaper had been obliged to apologise to the complainant, the Committee considered that the correction offered by the newspaper as part of IPSO’s attempt to mediate the complaint was insufficient.

Publication of this ruling was required as a remedy to the breach.