01008-25 Portes v The Daily Telegraph

Summary of Complaint

1. Jonathan Portes complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that The Daily Telegraph breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in an article headlined “More than one million foreign nationals are receiving benefits”, published on 17 March 2025.

2. The article – which appeared on page five - reported on the number of foreign nationals receiving welfare benefits in the United Kingdom. It said: “Benefits are being claimed by over one million foreign nationals, according to an analysis of government figures.” It went on to report that “analysis by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) suggests 40 nationalities – after getting indefinite leave to remain, settled status or refugee protection – are claiming benefits at a greater rate per head of population than British citizens. Three nationalities (Congolese, Iraqis and Afghans) are claiming benefits at four times the rate of British people.” It also said: “The Congo had the highest rate, at 445 claims per 1,000 of its population in the UK, based on 2021 census figures from the Office for National Statistics [ONS]. It was followed by Iraq at 434 per 1,000”.

3. The article went on to report that the cost of foreign benefit claims “is likely to increase as 800,000 foreign nationals are expected to receive indefinite leave to remain in the UK over the next decade following record levels of net migration of up to 906,000 a year, according to a separate analysis by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).” It further said:

“The CMC analysis is based on DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] data from 2019, which shows that there were 990,000 foreigners – 610,000 non-EU nationals and 380,000 EU nationals – who were claiming working-age benefits, an increase of 9 per cent on the year before. This compared with 6.1 million Britons, which had only increased by 4 per cent since 2018. The DWP has not updated the figures since the pandemic but CMC has estimated a further 168,000 claimants would have been added if foreign nationals’ claims continued at the same rate.”

4. The article also appeared online in substantially the same format, under the headline “More than one million foreigners claiming benefits”. This version of the article included the subheadline: “Households with at least one foreign national claimant received more than £7.5bn in universal credit in one year”. It also included the following additional passage, immediately following the above paragraph:

“This would give a cumulative total of 1,158,000 but will be lower as some will have left, died or stopped claiming. The CMC calculated rates of claims per nationality in 2019 relative to their overall population in the 2021 census.”

5. The complainant said that the article was inaccurate in breach of Clause 1, as it reported on data from the DWP regarding the number of foreign nationals who claim benefits – however, he said the DWP does not collect such data. He said that DWP statistics refer to the nationality of claimants when registering for a National Insurance Number (NINo), not their nationality at the time they were in receipt of benefits. He said the registration could have been up to 40 years prior to the data’s release, meaning that the claimants could since have obtained British citizenship and would not be foreign nationals at the time they claimed benefits.

6. The complainant provided information from the DWP in relation to the data, which stated “[s]ubsequent to registering for a NINo, people could change citizenship status to become UK nationals. Current citizenship is not accounted for in the production of these statistics” and that the “nationality for Non-UK nationals is recorded at the point of NINo registration and cannot be used as a proxy for current nationality or nationality at birth”.

7. The publication did not accept a breach of the Code. It said it was irrelevant that non-UK nationals may have subsequently become UK citizens: the data was about foreigners and foreign nationals who – at the time they claimed benefits – were recorded as such. It said the fact that a proportion of claimants may subsequently have obtained British citizenship was a matter of speculation and did not make the article inaccurate.

8. The publication set out the data’s provenance. It said the data came from the CMC, and was calculated using the DWP figures for working-age benefits and nationality. It said these figures showed the nationality of claimants based on when they were first assigned a National Insurance Number, broken down by each individual nationality. The publication said it had taken care over the accuracy of the article by reviewing DWP’s data and its analysis as well as the CMC’s analysis – it provided these datasets to IPSO during its investigation. It said its due care to ensure accuracy was also demonstrated by the article itself, as it set out a detailed breakdown of how the data was acquired and calculated.

9. With regard to the number of foreign nationals in receipt of benefits, and whether this had been accurately reported, the publication said the CMC analysis used 2019 figures – which were the most recent figures available from the DWP. The publication said these figures estimated that 990,000 benefit claimants were born outside the UK, which had been rounded up to a million in its coverage. The newspaper said these figures supported its analysis.

10. The publication said, when calculating the proportion and number of foreign benefit claimants in the UK relative to their overall population sizes, the CMC dataset recorded the number of 2019 claimants relative to the foreign-born population in the 2021 census. It said the 2021 census was used as it was the most accurate representation of nationalities in 2019, given it was from two years after the DWP 2019 data.

11. It also said the CMC analysis recorded the number of people given "Indefinite Leave to Remain” and “EU Settled Status” in the years since 2019 – it then assumed that those people, who were eligible to claim benefits, did so at the same rate as they did in 2019. It said the analysis “then sum[med] up that extrapolation across all countries and add[ed] it to the 2019 total figures” before “simply multipl[ying] the number of estimated claimants by the average working-age benefit payment.” It added the article signposted that “some of the original 990,000 will have died, left or stopped claiming.”

12. The publication also said the complainant could not provide any alternative statistics which showed that the article’s analysis was misleading in the manner he alleged.

13. The complainant disputed it was irrelevant that non-UK nationals may have subsequently become UK citizens. He said the data in the article related to the number of foreign nationals who claimed benefits; the question of whether they were indeed foreign nationals at the time they claimed the benefits was, therefore, relevant. He added that the point where someone first receives a National Insurance number was not the point at which they first claimed benefits in a very large percentage of cases. He noted the DWP stated this explicitly on its website:

“However, we are now aware that the scale of difference between nationality at the point of NINo allocation and nationality or citizenship status at the point of receiving benefits is likely to be very substantial. […] Whilst it is not currently possible to know the extent of the impact of this with regards to benefit claimants from available data, this should illustrate that these statistics cannot be used as a meaningful proxy for the nationality or citizenship of benefit claimants at the point of claiming benefits. […] these statistics can not be used as a proxy for nationality at birth and cannot be used to assess past migration status of benefit claimants.”

14. After having had sight of the CMC analysis provided by the publication, the complainant identified further alleged inaccuracies in the article. He said the numbers in the CMC analysis did not appear to bear any relation to the foreign-born population recorded in the 2021 Census. For example, he said the CMC’s data said that there were 11,000 people born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while the Census said there were 29,000. Similarly, for Iraq, the figures were 63,000 and 89,000 respectively.

15. He also said that the Census included population figures for England and Wales only, while the article was reporting on the number of benefit claimants in the UK. Therefore, he said it was not appropriate to compare these figures. He said, since the DWP statistics related neither to foreign nationals nor to foreign-born individuals, calculating a ratio using these statistics - and comparing it to the UK as a whole - made no sense. He said, therefore, both the article’s claim that foreign-nationals were claiming benefits “at a greater rate per head of population than British citizens” and the examples provided in the article to demonstrate this were inaccurate and misleading.

16. The complainant also said it was inaccurate for the article to claim the “CMC has estimated a further 168,000 claimants would have been added if foreign nationals’ claims continued at the same rate.” He accepted that more people would have claimed in the years following 2019, however others would have stopped claiming benefits or even have died. He said it was misleading to report how many further claimants there may be without also setting out how many people would have stopped claiming benefits.

17. The complainant further said the CMC was not a credible source: he said it appeared to be an anti-immigration campaign group which had no qualifications or expertise in the area of immigration-related statistics, and did not publish any research.

18. On 19 May – 61 days after initially being made aware of the complaint, and 25 days after the complainant’s further correspondence, setting out the additional alleged inaccuracies - the publication said the CMC analysis was accurately reported in the article, given the analysis stated the figures came from the 2021 Census. However, it accepted that the CMC analysis figures did not actually use the 2021 census. Rather, its population figures were taken from the ONS annual population estimates for the year ending June 2021. The publication said these estimates were UK-wide, and did not cover only England and Wales as the Census did.

19. Notwithstanding this, the publication did not consider the article to be significantly inaccurate on this point, as this was a third-party error – made by the CMC – in setting out the source of its figures. However, it confirmed that it had amended the references to the Census to instead refer to the ONS’s annual population estimates. It said that the following correction had been added as a footnote to the online article:

“A previous version of this article stated the CMC calculated rates of claims per nationality, including Congo, relative to their population in the UK in the ONS 2021 census. In fact, the population figures came from the 2021 ONS annual population estimates. We are happy to correct the record.”

20. The following correction was also published in print on 20 May in the newspaper’s regular Corrections and Clarifications column:

“An article ‘More than one million foreigners claiming benefits (March 17) stated the CMC calculated rates of claims per nationality, including Congo, relative to their population in the UK in the ONS 2021 census. In fact, the population figures came from the 2021 annual population estimates. We are happy to correct the record.”

21. Turning to the complainant’s point regarding the estimated additional claimants since 2019, the publication said the number of benefit claimants had very significantly increased since 2019: from 2.4% of the UK working age population in January 2019 to 4.1% in February 2025, according to the ONS. Therefore, it said it was reasonable to assume that the rate of foreign claimants had also increased. It said this meant that the CMC estimates could be an underestimate.

22. Turning to the complainant’s concerns about the CMC, the publication said that whether an organisation or person is a credible expert or source on the issue was a matter of legitimate editorial judgement. It said, whether or not the complainant agreed with its judgement, it was entitled to report on the CMC’s analysis.

23. The complainant said that the publication had claimed the data provided by the CMC referred to country of birth. However, he said the article referred to claimants’ nationality - which may be different to their country of birth - and the correction repeated the inaccurate claim. He said the APS data recorded resident population by country of birth and country of nationality. He said that, for Iraq, the figures were 51,000 and 20,000 respectively. However, the CMC analysis the publication provided used the figure 63,000. He said the large difference between the figures for country of birth and country of nationality data illustrated his point that many of those with foreign origin subsequently become UK citizens after registering for National Insurance numbers, and did not claim benefits until they were citizens.

24. In response to this, the publication said the DWP statistics referred to nationality at the point of registration. It said it was therefore a fair “basemark” to indicate claimants’ country of birth. It said this was because migrants were likely to register for National Insurance numbers shortly after arriving in the UK, long before they were entitled to acquire UK citizenship. As such, the publication said the corrections were also accurate.

25. The publication said the apparent discrepancy in the population figures was explained by the fact that the CMC used the upper estimate for each nationality group. It said the survey figures were for people born outside the UK and were official estimates of their country of birth. It said that, for Iraq, the CMC took the central estimate of 51,000 and then added the confidence level of 12,000 to create 63,000. It said these figures were not inaccurate.

Relevant Clause Provisions

Clause 1 (Accuracy)

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text.

ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and — where appropriate — an apology published. In cases involving IPSO, due prominence should be as required by the regulator.

iii) A fair opportunity to reply to significant inaccuracies should be given, when reasonably called for.

iv) The Press, while free to editorialise and campaign, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.

Findings of the Committee

26. The Committee first noted that newspapers are not responsible for ensuring that statistics produced by external organisations are accurate. However, they are responsible for ensuring that they take care over the accuracy of their own coverage and correct any significantly inaccurate information they publish.

27. The Committee also noted that the article in question was a news report, not an in-depth statistical analysis. While the newspaper was obliged to abide by the terms of the Code, the nature of news coverage means that reporting on statistics will likely be written in a way that ensures they are understandable by a general audience, and the coverage may not extend to the level of statistical detail which an expert may desire. However, a publication is still required to ensure its coverage is accurate and not misleading.

28. The Committee first considered the article’s claims that “[m]ore than one million foreign nationals are receiving benefits” and that “[b]enefits are being claimed by over one million foreign nationals, according to an analysis of government figures”. The Committee noted that the article set out the analysis upon which it was relying in making these claims: “The CMC analysis is based on DWP data from 2019, which shows that there were 990,000 foreigners – 610,000 non-EU nationals and 380,000 EU nationals – who were claiming working-age benefits”.

29. However, the Committee noted that the DWP data in question did not capture whether the claimants were foreign nationals at the time they claimed benefits. Rather, it recorded the number of benefit claims made by those who had registered for National Insurance numbers between 1975 and 2019 and who were, at the time of registering for a National Insurance number, a foreign national. Some of these individuals could have since become UK citizens, and this was not made clear in the article.

30. While the article had attributed the claim to “an analysis” of government figures, the Committee considered that the newspaper had not taken due care over the accuracy of the headline, which set out as fact that “More than one million foreign nationals are receiving benefits”. This did not make clear that the assertion was an estimate, and was presented without qualification. The print headline, as well as the online headline and its subheadline, did not accurately reflect warnings on reliability of the data, and presented the figures as fact, rather than an interpretation of the statistics by a third party. The Committee also considered that care had not been taken over the accuracy of the article, which did not make clear that it was not reporting on people’s nationality at the time they were claiming benefits, but their nationality at the time they first applied for a National Insurance number, which may have been significantly earlier. Absent this clarificatory information, the article was misleading to attribute the number of foreign nationals currently claiming benefits in the UK to this specific dataset.

31. The Committee recognised that – at the time of the article’s publication - there did not appear to be any confirmed and official statistics relating the number of foreign nationals claiming benefits. Neither the publication nor the complainant were able to provide such statistics, and the CMC analysis and the article were based on estimates.

32. However, while, as noted above, the publication was not responsible for the accuracy of the CMC’s analysis, it was responsible for ensuring its own coverage was accurate and not misleading. It was clear from the original data that it was based on estimates – for example, the DWP data included a proviso which made clear that “nationality for Non-UK nationals is recorded at the point of NINo registration and cannot be used as a proxy for current nationality or nationality at birth” and that “the scale of difference between nationality at the point of NINo allocation and nationality or citizenship status at the point of receiving benefits is likely to be very substantial”. It did not appear that the publication had taken the nature of the analysis into account when preparing its coverage – given the article did not reference any such proviso, or make clear that the benefit claimants referenced in the article may not have been foreign nationals at the time they were claiming benefits. As such, there was a breach of Clause 1 (i).

33. The Committee turned to the article’s reported ratios of benefit claimants per 1000 people amongst different nationalities. The ratios had been calculated by taking the total number of claimants of a particular nationality (at the point of their registration for a National Insurance number) and compared this to the UK population figures for foreign-born individuals. However, the complainant considered this to be misleading, as the nationality of benefit claimants at the time they registered for NINo may have been different from their country of birth. The complainant also complained about the method used to calculate the population figures taken from the Annual Population Survey.

34. The Committee noted the article had accurately reported the CMC’s calculated ratios. Notwithstanding this, the reported ratios relied on the premise that the DWP recorded people’s nationality at the time a benefit claim was made – which was, as noted above, not the case. For this reason, the publication had also not taken care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information when reporting these ratios. There was a breach of Clause 1 (i) on this point.

35. The complainant had also said that the correction already published by the newspaper was inaccurate, as he believed it repeated the inaccurate ratios. However, the Committee noted that the corrections simply referenced the ratios, and did not repeat the inaccurate information in the manner alleged by the complainant. Therefore, the correction itself was not inaccurate in the manner alleged by the complainant, and there was no breach of Clause 1 in relation to the corrections.

36. The next question for the Committee was whether the claims regarding how many foreign nationals were claiming benefits, including the reported ratios were significantly inaccurate and therefore in need of correction, as required by the terms of Clause 1 (ii).

37. The Committee considered that the presentation of statistics regarding the number of foreign nationals who claim welfare benefits was a matter of significant public interest and debate, and noted the importance of ensuring the public are not misled on this matter. The claim – which was based on the dataset - also appeared in the headline of both versions of the article, therefore giving it greater prominence. In regard to the ratios, the article did not make sufficiently clear the ratios were estimates based on data which did not account for foreign nationals who had subsequently acquired citizenship. As such, the publication was required to correct the article under the terms of Clause 1 (ii). As it had not offered a correction which addressed these points, there was a further breach of Clause 1 (ii).

38. The Committee next considered the accuracy of the calculation, reported in the article, of the number of foreign nationals claiming benefits after 2019. The complainant said the figure given in the article was inaccurate, as it did not account for those who had died or stopped claiming. The Committee noted that the article had stated its calculations were based on the premise that 990,000 foreigners were claiming working-age benefits in 2019, and that the CMC “estimated a further 168,000 claimants would have been added if foreign nationals’ claims continued at the same rate.”

39. While the Committee considered the reference to “foreigners” and foreign-nationals was inaccurate as explained above, it considered that the article had set out the basis for its claim that “a further 168,000 claimants would be added” – namely, that this was based on the premise that people would continue claiming at the rate they previously had. It further made clear this figure was an estimate and attributed this estimate to the CMC. As such, the newspaper had taken care over the accuracy of this estimate – by making clear it was an estimate, and the premise upon which it was made - and there was no breach of Clause 1 on this point.

40. The publication had accepted that the article inaccurately referred to data from the Census, when in fact it should have referred to the Annual Population estimates - which applied to the whole of the UK rather than just England and Wales.

41. While the article’s attribution of the source of the data was indisputably inaccurate, this error had originated with the CMC’s analysis. There was no indication in the data provided by the CMC that it had used the Annual Population estimates, and the Committee did not consider that the publication could have reasonably known that the CMC had made such an error. The Committee therefore considered that the error had not come about due to a failure on the part of the publication to take care over the accuracy of its reporting on this point. There was no breach of Clause 1 (i).

42. While there had been no failure to take care over its reference to this data, the Committee was still required to answer the question of whether this inaccuracy was significant and required correction. In this instance, the Committee did not consider this to be a significant inaccuracy: the reference to the source of the data did not materially affect the accuracy of the point being made – which was a comparison of the rates on benefit claims in certain nationalities relative to other nationalities. There was no breach of Clause 1 (ii) on this point.

43. In regard to the complainant’s concern that the CMC was not a credible source, the Committee noted that newspapers are entitled to select which information they publish or focus on, provided there is no breach of the Code. This meant that reporting on the CMC’s analysis did not, in and of itself, represent a breach of the Code. There was no breach of Clause 1 on this point.

Conclusions

44. The complaint was partly upheld under Clause 1.

Remedial action required

45. Having upheld the complaint, the Committee considered what remedial action should be required. In circumstances where the Committee establishes a breach of the Editors’ Code, it can require the publication of a correction and/or an adjudication; the nature, extent and placement of which is determined by IPSO.

46. The Committee considered that referring to those who had registered for National Insurance numbers between 1975 and 2019 as “foreign nationals”, when referencing the amount of benefit claims by this cohort - without reference to the fact that some of these claimants may no longer be foreign nationals - was inaccurate. This inaccurate information had appeared throughout the article, and was used as the basis for the article’s reporting of the number of benefit claimants from countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While the Committee considered this to be significantly inaccurate, it acknowledged that the data did encompass those claiming benefits who had once been foreign nationals. Therefore, on balance, the Committee considered that a correction was the appropriate remedy.

47. The correction should acknowledge that the article inaccurately referred to “foreign nationals” currently receiving benefits, rather than the actual subject of the dataset: individuals who were not UK citizens at the time they registered for National insurance numbers, and may have been UK nationals at the time they claimed benefits.

48. The Committee then considered the placement of this correction. The correction should be published in the publication’s print Corrections and Clarifications column given that this is the location where readers would expect to find such corrections and where the print article appeared on page five.

49. As the inaccuracies appeared in the headline and text of the article, the correction should appear as a standalone correction in the publication’s online Corrections and Clarifications column and a link should be published on the homepage for 24 hours before being archived in the usual way. In addition, if the publication intends to continue to publish the online article without amendment, a correction should be added to the article and published beneath the headline. If the article is amended to remove the inaccurate information, this correction may be published as a footnote.

50. The wording should be agreed with IPSO in advance and should make clear that it has been published following an upheld ruling by the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

Date complaint received: 18/03/2025

Date complaint concluded by IPSO: 30/09/2025