IPSO ruling leads The Daily Telegraph to correct claim on serious sexual offence statistics in migration commentary
The Independent Press Standards Organisation has ruled that The Daily Telegraph breached the Editors’ Code of Practice over an inaccurate statistical claim in a comment article discussing migration and crime. The ruling focused on a statement asserting that serious sexual offences in England and Wales had “quadrupled since 2015”, which IPSO found to be unsupported by the data available to the publication at the time. The complaint was partly upheld under Clause 1 on accuracy, though IPSO concluded that the corrective steps taken by the newspaper were sufficient and that no further action was required.
The article, published in February 2025 under the headline “JD Vance’s courageous lecture on migration has shamed our gutless elites”, combined commentary on a speech by the then US Vice-President with analysis of UK immigration policy. In doing so, it cited figures drawn from a third-party video documentary to characterise trends in serious sexual offending. IPSO found that while official statistics did demonstrate a fourfold increase in police-recorded offences since 2013, neither the documentary nor Office for National Statistics data substantiated the claim that such an increase had occurred “since 2015”.
Before correction, the wording implied a more recent and sharper escalation in offending than the figures supported. By advancing the baseline year by two years, the article compressed the timeline of change and overstated the pace of increase. IPSO noted that recorded offences had risen substantially over the past decade but not by a factor of four between 2015 and the most recent reporting period, making the original formulation materially inaccurate.
This misstatement was significant because it appeared within a broader argument linking immigration and public safety. Errors in timing and scale can alter how readers assess both causality and urgency, particularly where statistics are deployed in politically charged commentary. IPSO emphasised that while publications are entitled to rely on official recorded crime data and third-party analysis, they must take care that those figures are accurately described and not framed in a way that distorts their meaning. In this case, the Committee found that the newspaper had access to information showing the correct timeframe yet published a claim that did not align with it.
The ruling also illustrates how IPSO differentiates between error and remedy. The Telegraph amended the online version of the article, added a footnote correction, and published clarifications online and in print within days of the complaint being raised. IPSO judged these actions to be prompt and duly prominent, and accepted that they clearly set out the correct position. Other contested elements of the article, including references to migrant arrest rates for serious sexual offences and the distinction between recorded incidents and underlying prevalence, were not found to breach the Code.
Accuracy in reporting crime statistics is especially consequential, given their influence on public understanding and policy debate. IPSO’s decision underlines that even opinion-led journalism relies on precise handling of data. Where inaccuracies arise, the way they are corrected becomes part of how audiences judge credibility, reinforcing that precision is central to institutional trust rather than a technical afterthought.