MPs including transport secretary have used a figure for median salary for all rail sector roles

24 Jun 2022 | Full Fact's weekly news
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FACT CHECK
Average salary of workers involved in RMT rail strike is not £44,000

Transport secretary Grant Shapps claimed this week that the average rail worker earns £44,000 per year, compared to the average nurse’s salary of £31,000.

His comments were made during discussions about a strike currently underway by railway workers represented by the RMT union over pay, working conditions and job cuts.

The £44,000 figure has also been repeated by Conservative MPs Nick Fletcher, Jonathan Gullis and Chris Philp when talking about the strikes.

This figure is broadly correct as the median rail sector salary as defined in official figures. However, it is not representative of the average salary of the workers who are striking in this particular action.

According to the RMT, the median salary of its rail members is £31,000.

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FACT CHECK
RMT exaggerates money ‘wasted’ on PPE and NHS Test and Trace ([link removed])

In a widely shared tweet, which has since been shared on Facebook, the RMT union claimed the amount of money “wasted on PPE and track and trace” could pay for the NHS for years.

The tweet was a reply to the former health secretary Matt Hancock, who had said that the current rail strikes would cause disruption to the NHS.

Government spending on the NHS, and on PPE and NHS Test and Trace during the pandemic, both total billions of pounds. But the RMT’s claim is exaggerated.

Funding the NHS “for years” would cost hundreds of billions of pounds. In 2020/21 the UK government spent £223 billion on health and social care in total. In the year prior to the pandemic it spent £171 billion, of which £124 billion was spent out of the NHS England budget alone.

On the other hand, the amount of money spent so far on the entire NHS Test and Trace programme has been just under £30 billion.

The total value of the government’s pandemic PPE contracts was £13.1 billion, according to a report from the National Audit Office in March 2022.

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CAMPAIGN UPDATE
Parliament corrections inquiry announced ([link removed])

There was an important development in Full Fact’s campaign for honesty in politics this week.

A new inquiry was announced by the Procedure Committee, a group of MPs who consider and make recommendations on different matters in the House of Commons.

They will be reviewing how to handle corrections to Parliament’s official record. Currently, there is no way for an MP who is not a government Minister to correct the official record when they make a mistake in the House of Commons.

It sounds nonsensical, but it’s true. And we can’t have honest political debate in this country while the official record is littered with false or misleading claims.

More than 27,000 of you agree with us: we need to fix this broken system.

The Procedure Committee’s inquiry is a step in the right direction and a sign that MPs recognise that Parliament’s corrections system isn’t working.

As MPs conduct their review, this is a chance to show how many of us care about honest political debate.

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FACT CHECK
Child self-harm numbers in the Guardian, Mirror and Independent don’t reflect survey’s actual findings ([link removed])

Upsetting figures reported by the Guardian, the Mirror and the Independent for the proportion of children said to be suffering from mental health problems don’t reflect the actual findings of a survey by the Childhood Trust.

In particular, the 9% or “nearly one in 10” figure cited by the newspapers does not represent the proportion of all parents surveyed who said their children had started self-harming. It is the proportion of the third of parents who had already said their children raised concerns about the cost of living crisis.

When you take account of this, the proportion of all parents in the survey saying their children had begun self-harming would have been about 3%.

All these figures also include many parents of people who are over 18, a point not mentioned in any of the newspaper articles.

The cost of living crisis is a serious problem affecting many people, and there is evidence of a recent rise in mental health problems among children and young people. However, the Childhood Trust has confirmed there was an error in the way this survey was reported and issued its own correction.

Laurence Guinness, their chief executive, told us: “We thank Full Fact for bringing to light an error in the way our commissioned research data was reported.” The Guardian amended its article on 18 and 20 June, and at the time of writing it had been removed from the Guardian’s website pending further review.

The Mirror also amended its article after Full Fact contacted them.

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