Another day, another Telegraph correction

The Daily Telegraph has been forced to print yet another correction – this time for using creative accounting to run a bogus headline claiming a quarter of sex crimes in the UK were being carried out by “foreigners”.

The right wing newspaper – rapped in recent months for a nonsensical story claiming one every dozen people in London was an illegal immigrant and then forced to remove a fake story about a family forced to forego their five holidays a year due to Labour’s VAT charge on private schools – has again fallen foul of the press regulator.

In March, the Telegraph ran a story headlined “Quarter of sex crimes carried out by foreigners”, although the paper itself seemed a little sure of its figures, also referring to them as “up to a quarter” (which is meaningless) and online as “nearly a quarter”.

But the data only showed definitively that 15% of sexual offences recorded between 2021-2023 were committed by foreign nationals. A further 8% were recorded being committed as unknown nationalities. The Telegraph claimed this was “likely to largely include non-British nationals”, so simply added it to the total and decided that meant 23% of sex crimes were “committed by foreigners”, despite just 9.3% of the UK population being foreign nationals.

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Now the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) has said that, while the paper had, ahem, set out its workings, the print headline went too far by not making it clear this was the highest possible figure.

“The headline therefore gave the misleading impression that it had been established by the data that the ‘quarter’ figure was the definitive position – rather than the highest estimate,” the regulator said. It added that “the accurate reporting of who has committed sex offences is a matter of clear public interest” and the Telegraph’s percentage claim was “significantly misleading” and needed correction.

The Telegraph has now published a 68-word correction saying it followed “a partially upheld ruling by the Independent Press Standards Organisation”.

It’s the latest in the run of bad form by the paper, which remains in limbo after torturous attempts to find a suitable buyer. Earlier this year it had to correct a front-page story headlined “One in 12 in London is illegal migrant” after it emerged the calculation was entirely based on an incorrect population figure for the capital.

Then it raised a few eyebrows with a first-person piece decrying Labour’s imposition of VAT on private school fees, headlined “We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t afford to go on five holidays”. After sceptics doubted whether a family of high earners (supposedly named Al and Alexandra, with a daughter called Ali) would really have a two-year-old called Barry, it turned out to be the work of a hoaxer.