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The Daily Telegraph has been found to have misled readers about the impact of climate change on Britain’s railways, following a ruling by the UK press’ self-regulating body.
Following a six month back-and-forth with a climate think tank, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) has now upheld a complaint against the newspaper over an article published in April this year, which claimed there had been a “fall in weather [related] delays” on the rail network.
The story claimed that it “eroded” the Network Rail chief’s warnings over the impact of climate change on the sector.
But in response to a complaint from the non-profit Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, which tackles misinformation on the climate crisis, Ipso found that the article’s headline and opening sentence were “misleading” and “not supported by the article.”
The report, titled “Fall in weather delays erodes rail chief’s climate warning,” suggested that weather-related train disruption had decreased in recent years, supposedly contradicting warnings from Network Rail’s chief executive about the growing impact of climate change on railway infrastructure.
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However, Ipso’s ruling stated that while the percentage of weather-related delays among total delay minutes had fallen between 2020 and 2023, there had actually been an increase in the total delay minutes related to weather during this period.
The complaint was brought by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), an NGO that supports “informed debate” on energy and climate change issues. The ECIU argued that the Telegraph‘s article was misleading in several respects, including its presentation of data and its interpretation of trends in weather-related rail disruptions.
In its ruling, Ipso’s Complaints Committee said: “The Committee acknowledged the complainant’s concern that the headlines and article were misleading to refer to ‘falling’ or a ‘fall’ in weather delays.”
The regulator added: “The Committee noted that the article’s set of data actually showed that while the percentage of weather-related delays was falling amongst total delay minutes, from 2020 to 2023, there had been an increase in the total delay minutes related to weather.”
Ipso ordered the Telegraph to publish a correction acknowledging that its analysis did not show overall weather-related delay minutes were decreasing, but rather their share in the total of delay minutes was decreasing.
Both the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit and Network Rail pointed out that the four years covered saw a major increase in disruption caused by strike action, amid waves of national and localised strikes on the network.
This contributed to the overall number of disruptions on the rail network soaring, meaning that other causes of rail chaos such as extreme weather became relatively less pronounced – even while th