May should not get away with creating fake news about NHS
Chief reporter Martin Shipton argues that the Prime Minister’s misuse of statistics in attacking NHS Wales is a manifestation of fake news...
THERESA May has done political discourse no favours by issuing misleading statistics in her attempt to fend off an attack by Jeremy Corbyn on her Government’s handling of the NHS.
All Ministers have a responsibility to use statistics responsibly, and that of course applies to everyone in politics.
Policy makers need factual information before they can devise new strategies for our public services.
Having a statistical understanding of current situations is vital if new policies are to have a chance of making people’s lives better.
But if statistics are devalued by politicians who misuse them, the chance of achieving improvements in our society is greatly diminished.
It is, of course, perfectly proper for a political party to expose the shortcomings of its opponents by producing statistical evidence to back up an argument. But in doing so they have a duty to be scrupulously fair.
There have certainly been occasions when Labour’s Welsh Government has been rightly criticised on the basis of performance in health, education and the economy.
In the early years of devolution, for example, the administration made itself a hostage to fortune by claiming it could improve the Welsh economy to a point where the national GVA per head was 90% of the UK figure.
When the relative performance of Wales declined, instead of improved, we were told that the original “target” had been reduced to an “aspiration”.
It’s no wonder that opposition parties had a field day when that happened.
The NHS has been a statistical battleground for years. Before the 2015 General Election, the Conservatives were ferocious in their attacks on Labour’s running of the health service in Wales. Using statistics, they advised people living in Wales to vote against a party that had demonstrated its supposed incompetence, while warning people in England of their likely fate if Labour returned to power.
To gain maximum traction for their arguments, the Conservatives used newspapers that support them like the Daily Mail to get their message across.
Referring to the lack of availability of some pharmaceutical drugs to patients in Wales when they were available to patients in England, Prime Minister David Cameron famously – or infamously – referred to the Welsh border as a line between life and death.
Now Theresa May has joined the fray – but in a particularly dishonourable fashion.
Responding to Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, Mrs May sought to portray the NHS in Wales as having a significantly worse record in dealing with patients in A&E units than the NHS in England.
She told MPs: “If he wants to talk about figures and about targets being missed, yes, the latest figures show that, in England, 497 people were waiting more than 12 hours, but the latest figures also show that, under the Labour Government in Wales, 3,741 people were waiting more than 12 hours.”
But the comparison she made was not justified, because she was not comparing like with like.
The Prime Minister was, in fact, misusing statistics quite spectacularly, and in doing so creating her own piece of fake news.
In a letter to Sir David Norgrove, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, First Minister Carwyn Jones stated: “This is simply not a valid comparison of accident and emergency performance. In England the figures referred to are based on those patients who have waited more than 12 hours from a decision to admit to admission to a ward, whilst the figures for Wales reflect the total time spent in accident and emergency departments.
“The English figures will not include any of the time which the patient has spent in A&E prior to the decision to admit being taken.
“To highlight how misleading this comparison is, the most recent statistics published by NHS Digital for England show that the number of patients who spent more than 12 hours in A&E in 2016-17 was 262,367 compared to 3,502 who waited more than 12 hours from a decision to admit to admission.”
Mr Jones concluded: “The selective misuse of statistics like this does not allow for a fair debate on the NHS.”
He has rightly invited Sir David to consider Mrs May’s use of statistics on this occasion.
Fake news must not become common currency in our political discourse.
It is hard enough to stop it doing so on social media, where there are all manner of individuals, organisations and even governments putting out false information.
But when the head of the UK Government – dedicated as it is supposed to be to making evidencebased decisions – endorses incorrect statistics, then fake news is the victor.
If this is allowed to become the norm, our entire political process will be compromised.
We hope that the UK Statistics Authority takes this issue seriously and issues a suitable reprimand to Theresa May.