AN interview in which a top Labour minister’s claim that “pollution levels in Scotland are worse than they are in England” went unchallenged has been reported to the broadcasting watchdog.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed made the contested claim during an interview on Channel 4 News on Monday evening.
Interviewer Krishnan Guru-Murthy (below) failed to call out the claim, which has been contested by Scottish Water.
The publicly-owned corporation hit back on Tuesday, with a statement pointing to independent reviews of Scottish water which found it to be of a higher quality than that found in England.
Now the row has been escalated to Ofcom, which is tasked with upholding British broadcasting standards.
Chris McEleny, a former aide to the late Alba leader Alex Salmond, told Ofcom the report was “not accurate” and set out the four sections of the broadcasting code he believed had been breached.
He pointed out that the interviewer failed to “interrogate the interviewee to substantiate his claim” and argued that the “views of the UK Government have been given undue prominence which has allowed them to promote misinformation to the public”.
Speaking to The National, McEleny (above) added: “The Environment Secretary is a member of a UK Labour Government and talking down Scotland is what they do.
"So it’s not a surprise that he is attempting to promote misinformation about Scotland but broadcasters have a responsibility to ensure that if a UK minister is appearing on their programme that such a blatant misrepresentation of the facts is challenged, that the contrary view – in this case the facts – is given due prominence and that the true situation is actually communicated to viewers.
“This UK Labour Government must be held to account in its attempts to promote falsehoods to the public.”
Reed has also faced calls from the Scottish Government to retract the claim and apologise.
The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has found that 87% of the Scottish water environment is of “high” or “good” quality – up from 82% in 2014.
And a recent expert report from the Independent Water Commission found that 66% of Scotland’s water bodies were of good ecological status compared to just 16.1% in England and 29.9% in Wales.
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "This is absolute rubbish.
"Scotland has more pollution incidents than England for every mile of sewer – and Scotland’s monitoring of its water network is significantly worse.
"Rather than sending incorrect letters, this Government is fixing our broken water sector to clean up England's waterways for good."
