IPSO upholds accuracy complaint against the MoS from authors of Labour report

FOLLOWING an article published on June 23, 2019 in The Mail on Sunday, headlined ‘Corbyn “war on homeowners”’, Anna Powell-Smith complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that the newspaper had breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice. IPSO upheld this complaint and has required The Mail on Sunday to publish this decision as a remedy to the breach.

The article said that a report commissioned by Labour named ‘Land For The Many’ had proposed scrapping the Capital Gains Tax exemption on main homes, and that the same report had ‘approvingly’ cited proposals by another research institute for primary residences to no longer be exempt from Capital Gains Tax.

The complainant said that the commissioned report did not propose scrapping the Capital Gains Tax exemption on main homes, nor did it approvingly cite proposals by another report to scrap the exemption. The publication said that while the report did not propose scrapping the exemption for main homes from paying the existing Capital Gains Tax, the article was not inaccurate as the Land For The Many report proposed an alternative tax on the gains in capital value of main homes.

IPSO found that the report had in fact rejected proposals to scrap the Capital Gains Tax exemption for main homes, and instead recommended an annual levy on the increase in value of a property. The third party report had recommended scrapping the entire Capital Gains Tax system, which would not have affected main homes by virtue of them being exempt in the first place. The inaccuracy had featured prominently as it formed the central basis of the article and IPSO’s Complaints Committee considered that the article could cause significant concern to readers that, under a Labour government, they could be liable to pay a tax they are exempt from under current legislation.

IPSO found that the publication had failed to take care in reporting the recommendations made in a publicly available policy document in breach of Clause 1.