In our latest blog Head of Casework, Elise Rohan, talks about claims made during political party conferences and our expectations of producers in this period…
Every autumn, political parties in the UK host their annual conferences in what is known as ‘party conference season’. We were recently asked about our approach to intervening in speeches and statements made in these conferences under our responsibility to protect the role of statistics in public debate.
As with any concerns raised with us, our approach is guided by our interventions policy. It sets out how we use our voice to stand up for statistics, reporting publicly where we consider there is a likelihood of the public being misled on an issue of significant public interest.
We recognise that party conferences, much like election periods, require careful judgement about when to intervene. We are not moderators of political debate, and we understand that it is part of the democratic process for political parties to draw on a wide range of sources, including statistics, to persuade potential voters. Our focus is on ensuring statistics are not being misrepresented in these statements and speaking up where we identify the potential for the public to be misled.
Ahead of the 2024 UK General Election, we carried out dedicated monitoring of party manifestos, debates, speeches, and interviews given by members of political parties. While we do not take this approach to monitoring statements made during party conference season, our expectations for producers during this period remain the same.
- We do not expect producers to respond or publish an ad-hoc report for general statements made in a party conference. For example, where politicians make generalised comparisons of track records between political parties. This would not be proportionate, nor appropriate given conference speeches are political and should not involve statistics producers.
- However, in instances where a statement makes specific reference to statistics which aren’t in the public domain, we would expect producers to follow our intelligent transparency guidance for responding to unplanned releases of data.
For those seeing these statements, the most important thing to help combat the potential for statements to mislead is to develop the skills to critically challenge what you see and get in touch with us if you have concerns.