On 26th March, the staff team at 38 Degrees posted an image to our Facebook page, attempting to simplify the confusing debate on pledges to fund the NHS. Unfortunately, we got the numbers jumbled up and drew criticism from several different political parties – including Lib Dems on this website. This is an apology and an attempt to explain where we went wrong.
Our graph compared NHS funding pledges for 2015-16 from the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour, against the additional £8bn of funding that NHS England says it needs by 2020. We ended up comparing apples and pears. Lib Dems quite reasonably complained that presenting the information in this way obscured their flagship pledge to match that £8bn target by 2020. Both Labour and Conservatives have avoided matching that pledge.
Labour supporters also complained. We showed the Labour figure on the graph as £2.5bn – based on their pledge of £2.5bn in the “time to care” fund. But Labour says this £2.5bn is additional funding – £2.5bn on top of what the government has already said it’ll spend. And it’s due to be realised much sooner than 2020 (though it seems it’s disputed exactly when). So they argued that their bar on the graph should have shown them £2.5bn higher than the Conservatives or Lib Dems. Meanwhile, some Green Party and UKIP supporters complained that we’d failed to feature their positions at all.
It’s extremely hard to compare like-for-like pledges on NHS funding, given the different timescales and assumptions on which each of the parties claims are based. It’s well nigh impossible to compare them through the medium of one, simple bar chart which conveys all the relevant information.
We’ve had some feedback that our error made 38 Degrees look like it has a party political agenda. That just isn’t true: we’ve always been, and will continue to be, independent. We don’t have links to any political party. As well as Lib Dems, we’ve had complaints from UKIP, Labour and Green Party people about this graph. As is often the case with 38 Degrees, we managed to annoy politicians of several different political stripes at once.
We also had feedback that we should have done more to correct the error, more quickly. Whilst we acknowledged the mistake quickly, and removed the offending image from our Facebook page, there was a delay of almost a week before we published a new facebook post to clarify the figures.
I agree that when a mistake is made, it should be corrected in a timely way. The challenge in this case was that producing a “correct” version of the earlier flawed graph proved extremely difficult. We wanted to make sure we got it right rather than rushing and risk getting it wrong again.
As an illustration of the perils here, a few days later we did retweet a reworked version of the offending graphic produced by a Lib Dem source – a move which was welcomed on here on LDV. However, this version compared the Lib Dem’s 2020 pledge with 2015-16 figures for other parties – popular with Lib Dems but equally open to criticism from other political parties.
I suspect the author of the revised graphic probably wasn’t pursuing any deliberate pro-Lib Dem agenda when he made this new, differently flawed version. It’s just very hard to produce such a graphic, without obscuring important details in a way which will be perceived to favour some party over another. In the end we decided it was safer to abandon the graph format altogether.
We’ll try our best to avoid repeating this kind of mistake. We know how important accuracy is. 38 Degrees members have just donated tens of thousands of pounds to help FullFact fact check the election campaign. We’ve asked them to consider taking a look at NHS funding figures, to help us get it right in the future.
I do think the complexity of these pledges and the challenge of presenting them in an accessible graph does also show that the political debate on NHS funding is too murky. Politicians of all stripes have a tendency to use impressive-sounding numbers and technical announcements to make their case, in a way which can feel pretty impenetrable to the rest of us. This surely doesn’t help anyone in the long run.
At 38 Degrees, we try to cut through political debates, helping to simplify complex issues so that more people can engage with politics. That’s never more important to do than at election time, but it’s not proving an easy task with NHS funding pledges. We didn’t get it right this time and I’m sorry about that. We will keep on trying our best to make politics accessible to as many people as we can.
‘The Independent View‘ is a slot on Lib Dem Voice which allows those from beyond the party to contribute to debates we believe are of interest to LDV’s readers. Please email voice@libdemvoice.org if you are interested in contributing.
* David Babbs is the Executive Director of 38 Degrees.
