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During an interview on the 'Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg' show on BBC One, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt claimed that the level of youth unemployment in the UK was at a record low and that the number of jobs available to young people was higher than it had ever been.
Although this is true when comparing annual data, quarterly data shows that the level of youth unemployment has risen since it reached a record low last summer, while the overall number of vacancies available to all job seekers has fallen.
The way statistics are presented is a crucial part of how they are interpreted and understood by the public. If data is presented without clear context or obvious caveats, it can give an incomplete or misleading picture.
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FACT CHECK
Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist behind the Telegraph’s ‘Lockdown Files’ investigation which revealed a cache of Whatsapp messages sent and received by former health secretary Matt Hancock during the pandemic, has repeated inaccurate claims about 100,000 “ghost children” leaving education “forever” due to lockdown.
This is an old claim about the impact of the pandemic, and as we have written before, describing the 100,000 figure in this way is misleading. It is a figure for the number of children in England who missed at least half of their school sessions in Autumn 2020, not the number of children who disappeared completely from education.
Ms Oakeshott says in her Telegraph opinion article, the claim about 100,000 “ghost children” originates with the Center for Social Justice (CSJ).
The CSJ did publish a report about school attendance, but it does not say what Ms Oakeshott claims. In the summer of 2021, the think tank published a report claiming that between September and December 2020, 93,514 pupils in England were “severely absent”, which means they attended fewer than 50% of available sessions in Autumn 2020. While some of these children may not have come back, the figure does not entirely describe children who left school during lockdown and never returned.
We wrote to the Telegraph to ask for a correction and they have since removed the line from the online version of Ms Oakeshott’s opinion piece and issued a print correction which described the 100,000 claim as “incorrect”.
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FACT CHECK
Labour MP Imran Hussain, who also serves as the shadow minister for employment rights, has corrected himself after posting a tweet in which he wrongly claimed that only eight cases of tax evasion have been prosecuted in the last two years.
The figure of eight prosecutions refers only to prosecutions for the enabling of tax evasion. These are cases in which lawyers, accountants or other financial institutions are charged with assisting their clients in carrying out tax fraud.
However HMRC told Full Fact that in the past two years there have been a total of 399 tax evasion prosecutions.
We contacted Mr Hussain about his tweet. He thanked us for bringing the error to his attention and said that he had deleted his original post, replacing it with a new version. He added: “The tweet has now been posted with an amendment which clarifies that this relates to the enablers of tax evasion.”
If an MP makes a false or misleading claim on social media, they should correct this quickly on the same platform where the claim was made. We are grateful that Mr Hussain has done so in this case.
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MORE FACT CHECKS
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All the best,
Team Full Fact
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