700 The UK’s statistics watchdog has opened an investigation into remarks made by Rishi Sunak about the economy being “gangsters on the go” amid concerns that politicians could be misusing economic data in the run-up to the election.
Sir Robert Chote, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, will examine whether the prime minister repeated comments that were “taken out of context” and exaggerated the Conservative party’s economic data.
The phrase “going gangbusters” was used by an official at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) during an economic briefing with reporters before becoming the basis of a front page story in the Daily Mail last month. A week later, Sunak, in an interview on the Radio 4 Today programme, repeated the term.
In May, official figures showed that the UK was officially out of recession and that the economy grew by 0.6% in the first three months of the year after two quarters of contraction in the second half of 2023.
Referring to the figures showing that the economy expanded in the first three months of the year, Sunak told the audience: “Facts are facts. You had, I think, the person from the Office for National Statistics talking about the economic growth that the country produced in the first quarter of the year. He said what he said about it and I think he used the term “gangbusters” so I’ll leave it at that.
Chote’s intervention came shortly after he launched a review of Sunak’s claim that independent civil servants calculated that Labor would increase taxes by £2,000 for everyone if it won the election on July 4.
Labor has complained that the figure was wrong and was wrongly described as being independently verified by Treasury civil servants.
On Tuesday, ahead of the televised debate between Sunak and Labor leader Keir Starmer, Chote wrote to the main political parties and senior civil servants to warn them to “ensure appropriate and transparent use of statistics”.
Chote previously led the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Treasury’s independent forecaster, and was head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a leading arbiter of government tax and spending policies.
He is expected to take charge of reviewing Sunak’s comments, which could result in a warning to Conservative central office to stop using the term “gangbusters” in election broadcasts and debates or in print and online material.
An ONS spokesman said: “We have clarified to any media outlet or journalist who has approached us that [gangbusters] is not a word we would use to describe the UK economy.â€
It is the role of the regulator, and not the ONS, to contact political parties about their use of data, the spokesman said.
The outcome of the review will be complicated by the fact that the source of the comment is chief economist at the ONS, Grant Fitzner, who used the phrase “Gangbusters Going” at a press conference.
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The Daily Mail quoted him as saying: “To paraphrase former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, you could say the economy is going gangbusters.â€
The ONS has claimed it was not describing its view of the economy when it used the phrase and it was “out of context” when it became the basis for a story published by MailOnline and the front page of the Daily Mail. under the headline: “The economy is going gangbusters” Not a Tory’s verdict, but the ONS’s chief economist as Britain overtakes the US, France and Germany.
Other newspapers, including the Sun and Telegraph, used the phrase in subsequent stories.
Chote may be forced to reprimand Fitzner for veering into comments about the economy that could be interpreted as biased.
Dario Perkins, a senior economist at consultancy TS Lombard and a former Treasury official, said it was unwise for the ONS to say the economy was growing fast and wrong for the Prime Minister to use a quarter of GDP growth to argued that economic health had been. restored.
“The ONS is not supposed to use these kinds of descriptive words to tell a story about the economy. And it’s also wrong to say the economy is booming in the first three months of the year when we’ve just recovered the growth lost from last year’s recession and suffered the worst income squeeze in a generation.â€
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