Fix information failures or risk lives: the Full Fact Report 2021

Failures in public data and communication systems hampered the UK’s response to the coronavirus pandemic last year, a new report from Full Fact has said.

The UK’s independent fact checking charity, which receives funding from the Nuffield Foundation, checked more than 400 claims relating to the coronavirus in 2020. The new report points to repeated instances where government ministers failed to correct their mistakes, or back up public statements with evidence.

The report also details evidence of how the pandemic has exposed dangerous, long-standing gaps in the UK’s information infrastructure, affecting crucial issues from social care to personal protective equipment.

The report sets out urgent recommendations to improve the collection, use and communication of information, including:

• Work with transparency and accountability: Government analysts should speak directly to the press, to ensure that complex statistical or data-related questions can be answered accurately and quickly.
• Correcting communications mistakes: In light of last year’s missteps, there should be a Parliamentary inquiry into the oversight of government communications.
• Back up what you say with evidence: When ministers, government departments, or officials refer to data or information when speaking to the public, the media or Parliament, the full data must be made publicly available in real time.
• Be clear on targets: When the government publicly sets itself a specific target as part of a policy pledge, it should publish a set of metrics against which it will measure its progress, so the public and others can hold it to account.

Costly black holes in UK data

As the pandemic spread through care homes, vital information that should have informed containment efforts simply was simply not available. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak there was no process to collect daily data from care providers. Basic information, such as the number of people receiving care in each area, was not known to central government departments. These gaps in information on adult social care were known before the pandemic. 

Full Fact also encountered failures in the government’s tracking of data on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). The only information made public related to the number of new contracts with PPE suppliers and how many billion items had been supplied, with little clarity on what those items were—or if they were useful or sufficient. NHS trusts have said that a lack of available data on national stock levels of PPE made it hard for trust leaders to plan ahead.

The National Audit Office auditors reported that a new supply chain system for PPE—which saw it bought centrally and then distributed based on figures calculated centrally—initially didn’t have access to information on the levels of existing PPE trusts held.

Lack of transparency

Information that isn’t published can’t be scrutinised. The Office for Statistics Regulation has repeatedly called for information cited by ministers in public to be made available to the public. There were numerous instances during the pandemic where government officials referred to information that was not published publicly. These included health secretary Matt Hancock’s use of unsourced figures for the percentage of people in London and nationally with COVID-19 antibodies, and the government’s 31 October 2020 press conference to explain the decision to put England into a second lockdown, where data and assumptions for a reasonable worst-case scenario was not shared at the time.

Communicating and correcting errors

Full Fact highlights concerns about public trust in the government in the wake of missteps such as prime minister’s former advisor Dominic Cummings’ apparent flouting of lockdown rules, and use of algorithms to award exam results.

The report also outlines examples where ministers failed to correct the record when found to have made inaccurate statements, at a time when the public wants honesty over excuses. Out of 12 requests made by Full Fact to ministers about statements related to the coronavirus, only once did a minister attempt to clarify or correct them.