Election Live

3 years, 10 months ago

Labour's claim on NHS overtime: a plausible estimate

On Friday, the Guardian reported Labour Party research which found that “NHS staff are working over a million hours a week of unpaid overtime”.

The findings are based on data from the NHS staff survey, the most recent edition of which was published in February 2019, and Labour shared their calculations with us.

Based on what we’ve seen, it’s very much plausible that staff typically work a million hours of unpaid overtime a week collectively, but the data doesn’t show it definitively. These million hours would be spread between hundreds of thousands of NHS staff working a number of hours overtime per week.

The most recent NHS staff survey went out to over 1.1 million staff across 300 NHS organisations in England. Nearly 500,000 staff took part between October and December 2018.

Almost 463,000 staff responded to the question “On average, how many additional UNPAID hours do you work per week for this organisation, over and above your contracted hours?”

42% said 0 hours, 44% said up to 5 hours, 10% said 6-10 hours, and 4% said 11 or more hours.

If you assume that staff typically worked the average amount of overtime within the range they selected (so 8 hours for those who answered 6-10 hours, for example), this comes to roughly 1.1 million hours of unpaid overtime a week.

But that’s a broad-brush assumption and we can’t be certain that’s the case. If you were more cautious and assumed staff worked at the lower end of those ranges, it would show staff working about 670,000 hours unpaid a week

Nevertheless, the data certainly suggests it’s plausible that over one million hours of unpaid overtime are worked a week. 

It’s also important to remember that this survey was answered by 46% of the 1.1 million staff to whom it was sent out (and of those who answered, 93% answered the unpaid overtime question). So it won’t reveal the full extent of unpaid overtime within the NHS in England. 

We also don’t know whether those who answered the survey are representative of the rest of the wider NHS, or whether they did significantly more, or less, unpaid overtime than others.

3 years, 10 months ago

Conservatives repeat inaccurate claim on Labour’s immigration policy

Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show this morning, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab twice repeated the claim that Labour wants “open door immigration not just from Europe but from the rest of the world” and that it “would double the overall level of immigration”.

As we fact checked this week, this claim is not credible. Labour hasn’t published its manifesto yet and details are currently expected to be released in a few days. Jeremy Corbyn has signalled in recent interviews with the BBC, including later on in today’s Andrew Marr show, that the party’s priority is to secure free movement for people who have family with settled status in the UK.

In addition, there’s no evidence that the figures the Conservatives have put on Labour’s hypothetical policy are realistic.

3 years, 10 months ago

Who's Scot a job?

On Tuesday a Scottish government account tweeted that Scotland’s youth unemployment rate “fell by 0.3 percentage points over the year”. 

This is looking at a dataset which is less reliable than the usual statistics on youth unemployment—which actually show that youth unemployment has risen in the last year.

The UK Statistics Authority has today asked the Scottish government to make it clear that the data it used is not considered reliable.

You can read our full fact check here.

3 years, 10 months ago

Barclay’s Premier League: Is football coming home after Brexit?

Last season, for the first time in history, the finals of Europe’s top two club competitions were contested by teams from a single country—England, with the scorers including an Egyptian, a Spaniard, a Nigerian, a Frenchman and two Belgians. 

So you wouldn’t exactly think that English football was struggling due to a lack of international talent. 

However, yesterday Brexit secretary Steve Barclay tweeted a video claiming that, because the UK will have more control over immigration policy post-Brexit, this will mean we have more say as to where we recruit Premier League footballers from.

In the video he says we will be able to recruit players “on talent, rather than it being because they’re in Europe as opposed to the rest of the world.”

Players from the European Economic Area (EEA) can work in England with no restriction under EU freedom of movement laws, while non-EEA players have to get a work permit predicated on getting an endorsement from the FA.   

The FA gives endorsements out based on whether a non-EU player plays enough for their international side, and takes into account the value of the player and wages offered. 

Mr Barclay’s comments drew some confusion, because it’s not EU rules that restrict the talent pool for Premier League clubs, but the UK’s own laws restricting visas to non-EU players.

However Mr Barclay also said in the video that, alongside the desire to recruit the most talented international players, there’s also the interest (especially from the FA) to develop homegrown talent.

And here he may have more of a point. Because there are basically no restrictions on recruiting EU players, that’s had the effect of decreasing the proportion of domestic players playing at the highest level in recent decades. That (in part) led the FA to decide to impose restrictive criteria for granting visas to non-EU overseas players.

In a post-Brexit situation where EU Freedom of Movement rules no longer applied, the UK could potentially loosen visa requirements on non-EU players and increase them on EU players, meaning talent is drawn to the Premier League across the world more evenly, while retaining or even expanding opportunity for homegrown players.

3 years, 10 months ago

Of maggots in orange juice (and other gross things)

If you've been paying attention to the news this election, there's a good chance you'll have heard a Labour politician mentioning maggots in orange juice. But what is the truth? Will we all be drinking maggot-laden orange juice post-Brexit?

We've written a lengthy fact-check on this very issue (which you'll be delighted to learn also covers rat hairs in paprika). The long story short: there is a real issue there, in that US food safety standards are generally agreed to be less stringent than current UK and EU standards, and so food standards could be on the table in a future trade deal.

But suggesting that the US "allows" a certain number of maggots in orange juice is a misreading of the US regulations—they set levels at which enforcement actions must be taken, but that doesn't mean that levels below that are absolutely hunky-dory.

The UK, by contrast, doesn't have any level at which enforcement becomes mandatory. So under the same reading, you could claim that the UK technically allows an infinite number of maggots in its orange juice. That would be daft, of course: it's just that the two regulatory systems work in slightly different ways.

The other point, of course, is that food standards often focus their attention on food safety: contaminants in food that could actually cause health issues. That's what the debate around food standards is based on. But maggots in your breakfast orange juice wouldn't actually be dangerous; they're just disgusting.

We should also note, in fairness, that when we wrote about this issue before, we also carelessly used the phrase "acceptable levels" to refer to these mandatory enforcement levels, so we probably can't be too judgey. But let's all agree to not say it again.