Complaint
This edition of More or Less looked at the UK’s rising national debt, a subject which had been raised in a speech and on social media by the former Prime Minister Liz Truss. Β A listener complained the programme used it as a jumping off point for a much longer section which amounted to a highly critical tirade against Ms Truss and her policies. The ECU assessed the programme against the requirement for due impartiality set out in the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Editorial Guidelines.
Outcome
More or Less sets out to analyse, explain and sometimes debunk numbers and statistics used in everyday life, political debate and the news.  In this edition the team chose to look at the issue of the rising UK national debt and highlighted the tension between Liz Truss’s professed concern about it and the impact her own policies had had on it.  The programme gave a reasoned and factual account of how the Truss mini-budget had led to higher government borrowing costs and ultimately to an increase in the national debt.  It also explained Liz Truss had hoped her policies would spark economic growth which in turn would increase tax revenues and that she was not the only person who argued that this policy would have the desired effect. In the ECU’s view, this was not evidence of bias, but of the programme’s practice of subjecting the words and actions of politicians of all parties to analysis.
Not Upheld