In February 2025, Hacked Off published an article highlighting how UK newspapers were using unreliable and often dubious statistics to manipulate facts and promote certain political narratives. This trend has continued in the year since, and a certain think tank has played a key role in promoting questionable analysis. This article looks at 2 examples of articles that have been published this year following analysis by The Centre for Social Justice (the CSJ).

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Foreign Workers Being Hired at 27 Times the Rate of British Workers

On the 28th of May 2026, the Daily Express published an article headlined:

“27 young foreign workers hired for every one Brit as immigration fuels unemployment crisis”

This headline instantly attracted attention on social media from both sides of the political spectrum. However, some expressed doubt about the statistics behind the headline.

As the article goes on to attribute, the source of the analysis is a think tank, the CSJ. The CSJ was founded in 2004 by Conservative politicians, including Iain Duncan Smith, and is now a prolific publisher of political statistical analysis.

The “27 for 1” statistic was derived from analysing payroll data for the 16 – 24 age bracket and measuring how it had changed over a 6-year period. The CSJ then looked at the increase in these numbers across both UK nationals and non-EU migrants. It is certainly true that over the 6-year period, the increase in the two categories was larger for non-EU migrants, by a factor of 27 times. However, this tells us nothing about the hiring rates within the 6-year period.

Analysis by Emma Monk found that, when analysing data from HMRC, it was an entirely different story. There were actually “10 times as many UK under-25s in paid employment as there were non-EU under-25s”. This shows how disingenuous the original reporting was by the CSJ, and the willingness of newspapers to spread their inaccuracies without any independent investigation is a worrying trend.

The CSJ has a history of inaccuracy, dating back as far as 2013, when “Full Fact” reported on the CSJ’s reporting on the “breakdown of family”. In an initial press release, the CSJ included statistics on the prevalence of male teachers in primary schools, but when the report was eventually released, the statistics were nowhere to be found. The CSJ subsequently amended the article, but only after the damage was done.

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Statistics on Welfare Claimants

Welfare benefits are a contentious issue in British politics, with 14% of people considering welfare to be one of the top two issues facing the country, according to recent YouGov polling. The welfare system is also an inherently complex issue to understand, with many factors impacting people’s entitlement to payment.

The British press could therefore play a very important role in educating the population about the system and contributing to informed debate. However, The Sun, makes absolutely no attempt to inform. The headline of an article published on the 30th January 2026, in The Sun, stated that:

“Benefits handouts beat wages of six MILLION workers with 1 in 4 Brits in full-time jobs worse off than being on dole”

This headline was followed by the opening statement:

“It means a quarter of those in full-time employment would be financially better off on the dole.”

Following such a strong statement, you would hope The Sun would have the evidence to support it; however throughout the article, they make no attempt to explain how they reached their conclusions, beyond loose comparisons between various living wage statistics and a hypothetical benefits claimant who is claiming at the higher end of what people may be entitled to. There is no attempt at even surface-level analysis.

The Sun states that the article is based on research conducted by (once again) The Centre for Social Justice, but doesn’t link to this study or expand upon the methodology.

The study itself was discussed in the popular BBC Radio 4 program “More or Less”, which can be listened to here, and was referred to as disingenuous. Whilst it is true that it is possible for a family receiving benefits to be “better off” than 25% of British workers in employment, this requires an incredibly rare set of conditions to be met. The suggestion of the headline that the average benefits recipient receives more than 6 million British workers is entirely incorrect.

Once again, this represents an example of the CSJ being able to dictate media coverage without any scrutiny into their work.

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What this Means

The two stories discussed above, which were published months apart in different newspapers, share the same source. In each case, manipulated statistics were produced by the CSJ and then repeated by national newspapers without any fact-checking.

The CSJ is of course entitled to advance a political argument. However if these arguments are to be repeated in national newspapers, we should be entitled to expect that, at bare minimum, the newspapers have ensured that the findings are supported by the statistics. Instead, by simply repeating these statistics, they give the CSJ credibility that is undeserved and readers are likely to assume that they have been sufficiently analysed. Hacked Off calls for a “free and accountable” press, and it is examples like these that show why accountability of newspapers to ensure their reporting is accurate would help promote a healthier political discourse in the UK.

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