The government finally corrects its misleading sunbeds claim

In late January, as part of an announcement on stricter rules for sunbeds, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said they were “as dangerous as smoking”. It said the same in social media posts that were shared by the health secretary and NHS England—but this was misleading.

Smoking and sunbeds both cause cancer, but that doesn’t mean they’re equally risky. Experts say the evidence suggests that smoking is much more harmful overall.

Now at last—weeks after we published our fact check on the subject—the DHSC has corrected its announcement and its Instagram and Facebook posts, and deleted its post on X. (Separately, we’ve also spotted that a misleading comment about the claim from the xAI chatbot Grok seems to have been deleted.)

The page on the Gov.uk website now (correctly) says: “The World Health Organisation (WHO) has classified UV-emitting devices, such as sunbeds, a Group 1 carcinogen. This is the same category as other cancer-causing hazards such as tobacco smoking, radon and asbestos.”

Getting this corrected is more than just a point of principle. People can be misled by bad information when they use search engines or chatbots long after it was published. And bad information from official sources is particularly harmful, because people—and AI tools—are more likely to trust it.

We’re grateful to the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), which took up our case and secured these corrections after the government initially declined to change what it had already said.

The OSR has told us that a note has also been circulated within the DHSC and NHS England asking staff not to use this claim in any further communications.

This is why we do the work we do. It’s not enough to point out when something’s wrong. We need to fix it for the future.