Prime Minister’s Telegraph comment piece corrected after Full Fact intervention

Full Fact is pleased to have secured a correction to a comment piece by the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

In the article published on 31 January in the Telegraph, Mr Sunak claimed that “18-week waits” in the NHS were “down by 90 per cent.”

However, as we pointed out at the time, 18-week waits for non-emergency NHS treatment in England had actually risen by 4-9% since the government made its pledge to reduce waiting lists.

When the claim was made, we invited the Telegraph to provide a comment for our fact check, before writing to both the Telegraph and Mr Sunak to request a correction. We sent a reminder to Mr Sunak, but he still did not respond. The Telegraph told us to go through their editorial complaints process.

The Telegraph has now amended the comment piece, added a correction note at the bottom, and included the correction in its online Corrections & Clarifications column.

In the correction, the Telegraph says that the mistake in the original comment piece was caused by “a production error”.

We’d like to thank the Telegraph for this correction. However, we are concerned that Mr Sunak did not reply to our request and that it took over a month for his article to be corrected.