Another deeply flawed ruling by the UK press complaints handler
A new ruling by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) has demonstrated again that many British newspapers are being allowed to engage with impunity in a misinformation campaign about climate change and energy issues. It proves IPSO does not protect readers against climate misinformation, writes Bob Ward.
IPSO has a long track record of failing to act against newspapers that promote misinformation about energy and climate change. The complaints process in this latest case – which included an 11-month investigation by IPSO – led to a bizarre ruling that resulted in a failure to hold to account the Daily Mail, which is among its funders. The ruling, published on 4 December, demonstrates once again that IPSO cannot be trusted to carry out its stated mission to “protect the public and freedom of expression by upholding high editorial standards”.
Distorted attack and inadequate response from the Daily Mail
The complaint under investigation was one I lodged about a vitriolic polemic by Andrew Neil, published by the Daily Mail on 20 July 2024, which was riddled with false claims about climate change policies.
Mr Neil has a long track record of promoting climate change denial and other misinformation: as editor of The Sunday Times he oversaw a harmful campaign to convince readers that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. He now writes a regular column for the Daily Mail, in which he vents his political views, often with scant regard for facts.
Mr Neil’s article on 20 July 2024 appeared under the headline ‘One day Starmer will wonder aloud why he ever gave this one-man wrecking ball the job’. Most of the article was devoted to a bitter personal attack on Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Such was Mr Neil’s determination to prosecute his case that he distorted, misrepresented and obscured the facts in a deliberate and systematic way. Thus the article clearly breached Clause 1 (i) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, which states: “The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text.”
I wrote a complaint to the Daily Mail on 11 August 2024 about Mr Neil’s article. I received a request from the newspaper for clarification on 16 August, to which I responded on 5 September.
On 25 October, the newspaper contacted me again, stating:
“Your complaint is quite long and technical and I was at a conference yesterday, so I am currently still reading it through – it may also be a couple of days until I can get a response from Andrew Neil, and my manager who authorises any correction is on holiday.
“However, in the meantime, I think it would be helpful in the spirit of trying to resolve your complaint, if you had any suggested wording for a correction or amendments to the online article.”
On 31 October, more than two months after I submitted my complaint, the newspaper wrote to me again, providing cursory responses to about half the points I had raised, and asserting that there had been no breach of the Editors’ Code of Practice.
On 21 November I wrote to the newspaper to point out that they had ignored half the points I had raised. I received no further communication from the newspaper so indicated to IPSO on 9 January 2025 that I wished to proceed with a complaint.
IPSO’s ruling – endorsing a lax approach to the facts
Almost 11 months on, IPSO has now published its ruling, rejecting all but one point of my detailed complaint and refusing to recognise the multiple inaccuracies and distortions in Mr Neil’s article.
The ruling accepted that Mr Neil’s article was wrong to state: “Half of Denmark’s electricity is generated by wind and is the most costly in Europe.” Official statistics from Eurostat showed at the time of Mr Neil’s article that the average electricity price in Denmark was cheaper than in Belgium, Germany and Ireland. The newspaper has now published a correction about this point in the print and online versions of the article.
However, the IPSO ruling excused the many other false statements in Mr Neil’s article.
For instance, the article stated: “Miliband is enthusiastically implementing Labour’s pledge to ban any new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. He might even have banned some licences that were already in the pipeline but whose approval process was not quite complete when Labour came to power. But that’s not clear, such is the confusion in his department.”
This was entirely untrue and simply a case of Mr Neil repeating a falsehood that had originally been promoted by The Daily Telegraph on 11 July 2024, but which had been comprehensively debunked. Tim Eggar, the Chair of the North Sea Transition Authority, which is responsible for the licensing process, wrote a letter on 12 July rebutting the newspaper’s false claim, describing it as “a complete fabrication”.
Mr Neil clearly made no attempt to establish the truth, and the newspaper did not bother to check his claim. Such a lax approach to the facts is not consistent with the requirement under the Editors’ Code of Practice to “take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”. Yet IPSO’s Complaints Committee completely ignored this, instead ruling: “The Committee noted, however, that the article under complaint had reported that Mr Miliband ‘might’ have banned the licences, and that it was ‘not clear’. It was also not in dispute that it had previously been reported that Mr Miliband had banned planned licenses.”
This was not the only example of the IPSO Complaints Committee deciding that once a falsehood has been promoted by the media or a politician, newspapers can repeat it as fact.
In another false claim, Mr Neil’s article stated: “Even the Climate Change Committee [CCC] admits fossil fuels will still supply 25 per cent of our energy by 2050, when we’re legally meant to hit Net Zero.” However, the CCC has never published an estimate of the contribution of fossil fuels to UK energy supply in 2050. In its attempt to justify this claim, the newspaper cited a BBC news interview on 31 July 2023 with the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, during which he stated: “I think it’s really important for everyone to recognise that even in 2050 when we are at net zero that it is forecast that around a quarter of our energy needs will still come from oil and gas.” This, of course, did not substantiate Mr Neil’s assertion.
The newspaper also cited a media release from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero issued on 31 July 2023, which included the following statement: “With the independent Climate Change Committee predicting around a quarter of the UK’s energy demand will still be met by oil and gas when the UK reaches net zero in 2050, the Government is taking steps to slow the rapid decline in domestic production of oil and gas, which will secure our domestic energy supply and reduce reliance on hostile states.”
Unfortunately, that media release was inaccurate. Neither Mr Neil, nor any of his colleagues at the Daily Mail, bothered to contact the CCC about the claim. Helena Horton, a journalist at The Guardian, did. She was told by a spokesperson for the CCC: “The data is used from our sixth carbon budget but they [the Department] used their own calculation to get to that.” Horton’s article was published on 6 October 2023.
The Daily Mail suggested to IPSO during the complaints process that the original source of Mr Neil’s claim was the ‘headwinds’ scenario shown in Table 3.4a on page 143 of the CCC’s report on The Sixth Carbon Budget: The UK’s Path to Net Zero, published in December 2020. However, that table shows only that renewables would be expected to meet 75 per cent of electricity demand in 2050, with “dispatchable generation”, largely gas-fired power stations, meeting a further 15 per cent. These figures thus do not substantiate Mr Neil’s claim.
The IPSO Complaints Committee ignored this evidence that the Government had fabricated the “around a quarter” figure and instead endorsed Mr Neil’s misrepresentation of the CCC’s findings, stating in its ruling:
“The [IPSO Complaints] Committee recognised that there was clearly some debate as to the correct position on this point. The publication had demonstrated that both the then-Prime Minister had said the disputed claim, and it had been included in an official Government press release.
“It appeared, to the Committee, that the previous Government had interpreted the CCC’s findings in the manner reported in the article under complaint. The publication was entitled to rely on the Government’s interpretation of the CCC’s findings, and doing so did not represent a failure to take care over the accuracy of the article on this point. There was no breach of Clause 1 (i).
“Further, the Committee did not consider it a significant inaccuracy for the publication to report the disputed findings. Whether the claim originated from the CCC, or from the Government’s interpretation of the CCC’s findings, was not significant to the article as a whole. It was not in dispute that the reported figure had been widely reported as a finding of the CCC.”
Wrong on wind ‘subsidies’ and solar farm impacts
The IPSO ruling also contained yet another example of allowing the Daily Mail to repeat a falsehood as fact. Mr Neil’s article stated: “If it were true that renewables were cheaper, wind power companies would not be demanding ever bigger subsidies – in the form of long-term price guarantees linked forever to inflation – to build more renewable capacity. But they are.”
My complaint pointed out: “This is completely untrue. Contracts for Difference auctions show that the cost of offshore wind power has decreased significantly. The second round of auctions in 2017 allocated contracts for offshore wind at a price of £57.50 and £74.75 per megawatt-hour (in 2012 prices). The fourth round of auctions in 2022 allocated contracts at a price of £37.35 per megawatt-hour.”
During the complaints process, the newspaper cited an article that was published in the Financial Times on 16 November 2023 under the inaccurate headline ‘UK government to increase offshore wind subsidies by 66%’. This newspaper report was based on a press release issued on the same date from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. This stated that the maximum price for offshore wind in the sixth round of auctions would be capped at £73 per megawatt-hour (in 2012 prices), compared with a maximum price of £44 per megawatt-hour for the fifth round. No contracts were awarded for offshore wind in the fifth auction round. Contracts for offshore wind in the third round were awarded at £39.65 and £41.611 per megawatt-hour.
Although the maximum auction price for the sixth round was higher than the contracts awarded in the third and fourth rounds, it was lower than the rate for many of the contracts awarded in the second round. Given that contract prices decreased steadily between 2017 and 2022, Mr Neil was wrong to claim that wind companies are “demanding ever bigger subsidies”. Indeed, the results of the sixth auction round, announced on 3 September 2024, show that contracts were awarded for offshore wind at £54.23 and £58.87 per megawatt-hour, below the prices for the second round.
The IPSO ruling also exposed another significant flaw in its complaints handling service, which does not require the Complaints Committee to consult experts about issues of which it has no technical knowledge.
Mr Neil’s article stated: “Many more such developments will be rolled out. Not only do they lay waste to the countryside, they undermine our food security. We already import too much food. By covering good farmland in solar panels, we will soon be importing more. Food prices will be even more vulnerable to volatile world markets.”
In my complaint, I pointed out that there is no evidence that solar farms are a threat to the UK’s food security. Solar farms are not built on prime agricultural land. The national planning guidance for renewables notes: “Solar is a highly flexible technology and as such can be deployed on a wide variety of land types”. It further states:
“While land type should not be a predominating factor in determining the suitability of the site location applicants should, where possible, utilise suitable previously developed land, brownfield land, contaminated land and industrial land. Where the proposed use of any agricultural land has been shown to be necessary, poorer quality land should be preferred to higher quality land avoiding the use of ‘Best and Most Versatile’ agricultural land where possible.”
The guidance also states: “Along with associated infrastructure, a solar farm requires between 2 to 4 acres for each MW of output. A typical 50MW solar farm will consist of around 100,000 to 150,000 panels and cover between 125 to 200 acres.” As I stated in my complaint, this means that if the Labour Government’s target of 50 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2030 were met entirely through solar farms and no rooftop, it would occupy up to 200,000 acres. The utilised agricultural area of the UK is about 42 million acres and thus 50 gigawatts of solar farm capacity provided through solar farms alone would occupy an area equivalent to less than 0.5 per cent of the country’s agricultural land. Clearly this would be no threat to food security.
But the Complaints Committee did not accept this evidence disproving Mr Neil’s false claim, instead ruling:
“The Committee recognised, as before, that the complaint, and the statements in the article, were both speculative. It was not in a position to determine to what extent solar panel developments may impact the UK’s food security, or create or diminish new jobs.
“At any rate, the Committee considered it clear that the disputed lines were the author’s conjecture, which the article provided the basis for. Regarding solar farms, the article went on to make clear the basis for the author’s view that food security would be impacted by solar farms: ‘By covering good farmland in solar panels, we will soon be importing more’.”
During the complaints process, I argued that the IPSO Complaints Committee should seek expert advice instead of trying to absolve itself of any responsibility for establishing the accuracy of technical claims. However, IPSO’s ‘Independent Complaints Reviewer’ rejected my reasons, stating in a letter to me:
“Where the Committee decided that the statements regarding solar farms were speculative and conjecture, as opposed to statements of fact, there was no flaw in the process when it did not ‘consult experts’ as part of its investigation. IPSO’s role is to investigate, which involves receiving evidence and submissions from both parties, which it then passes to the Committee to consider. I am satisfied that the Committee was not required to seek its own expert advice on this issue. That is outside of the Committee’s remit. I am content that the Committee followed the correct procedure.”
Thus both the IPSO Complaints Committee and its Independent Complaints Reviewer excused Mr Neil’s inaccurate statements about solar farms by treating them as speculative conjecture and hence exempt from Clause 1 (i) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.
There were other examples in the IPSO ruling of bizarre interpretations of the claims in Mr Neil’s article. He wrote: “Farming jobs will be at risk or lost. House values will be blighted by nearby development. There will be precious few new jobs to compensate – nearly all the solar panels will come from China and only one in ten turbines will be built in Britain (if we’re lucky).”
In fact, there is no evidence that the deployment of solar farms will lead to a loss of farming jobs. But there is ample evidence that renewables are already creating significant numbers of new jobs, as I highlighted in my complaint. For instance, according to the Offshore Wind Industry Council, the UK offshore wind industry supported 32,257 jobs in 2023, with an increase to 104,401 expected by 2030 if capacity grows to 50 gigawatts. Labour’s manifesto pledged to increase capacity to 55 gigawatts by 2030.
However, the IPSO ruling, in its seemingly desperate scramble to defend Mr Neil’s article, conflated the statement about farming jobs with completely separate passages from Mr Neil’s article, which stated:
“The Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce, whose members operate in what is still (just) the oil capital of Europe, says 100,000 jobs are now at risk and £30billion in new investment.”
The IPSO ruling states:
“Turning to the claim about ‘precious few new jobs’, the Committee noted that the article provided an example of possible risks to future jobs. It reported that North Sea oil production supports around 200,000 jobs, and that the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce ‘says 100,000 jobs are now at risk’. While the complainant had pointed to the Offshore Wind Industry Council saying ‘the UK offshore wind industry supported 32,257 jobs in 2023, with an increase to 104,401 expected by 2030’, it wasn’t in dispute that jobs were at risk, and that the number of jobs forecasted to replace them would still leave an overall shortfall in jobs. This supported the reported statement that there would be ‘precious few new jobs’. In light of the above factors, there was no breach of Clause 1 on these points.”
Apparent bias
Overall, this ruling lays bare the fundamental flaws in IPSO’s complaints handling service. It suffers from an obvious bias towards the newspapers that fund it, and the Complaints Committee, which does not include any climate experts among its membership, clearly struggles to grasp technical issues yet refuses to seek expert advice. As a result, IPSO is seemingly unable to uphold Clause 1 (i) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, and to protect audiences against systematic misinformation about energy and climate change issues from propagandists such as Andrew Neil.