Labour councillor demands apology over “dodgy” teenage pregnancy stats
By Rachel Charman
Ian Gilbert, Labour councillor for Victoria, has called for Southend’s Conservative MPs to apologise over recent teenage pregnancy statistics released by their party.
The Conservatives recently released “Labour’s Two Nations”, which the party claims is a “comprehensive assessment of the level of inequality under this Labour government:, and “exposes the truth” about Labour’s alleged failings.
In the document, it is claimed that in Britain’s most deprived areas, 54% of young women are likely to fall pregnant under the age of 18, compared to 19% in the least deprived areas.
Official records, it emerged last night, actually show that the statistics are 5.4% and 1.9% respectively.
A spokesman for the Conservatives said: “A decimal point was left out in a calculation.
“It makes no difference at all to the conclusions of a wide-ranging report which shows that Labour have consistently let down the poorest in Britain.”
Cllr Gilbert has claimed that in Southend, a number of agencies ahve worked together to reduce teenage pregnancies, and that there are 22% fewer teenage pregnancies in Southend now than there were in 1997.
Cllr Gilbert said: “This is a shocking misuse of statistics by the Conservative for the second time in a fortnight.
“Not content with misrepresenting crime figures, they now attack our country’s teenagers and those who work with them.
“What David Cameron and his party don’t realise is that these sort of stories are a slap in the face for all the people who have been working very hard on a difficult and sensitive problem.
“I’d like to see our towns Conservative MPs apologise for their party’s scare-stories on crime and teenage pregnancy.”
The document, “Labour’s Two Nations”, is available here.
Southend Conservative MPs David Amess and James Duddridge had not responded to Councilbust.com’s requests for comment at the time of publication.
Its only a decimal point: ratio remains the same. Leave off it Mr Gilbert!
No Martin – somebody in the Conservative Party sat down and wrote a report at claimed specifically, explicitly and several times over that over half of teenagers in deprived areas fall pregnant. For example, page 12 it says
“In the most deprived areas, 54 per cent are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18″
You will also find the same statistic quoted on other pages. It is not just a decimal point in the wrong place.
At best this shows that the Conservatives are so eager to believe the worst of people that they don’t even notice glaring errors in what they claim to be a comprehensive and important document.
I wouldn’t worry Martin, Cllr Gilbert’s only doing what he’s been told to do:
http://www.easternlabour.org/east-of-england-labour-call-on-tories-to-come-clean-over-dodgy-c
[...] Ian Gilbert, over on CouncilBust, has even gone as far as demanding an apology from the two Southend MPs, James Duddridge and David [...]
Ok, so the Conservatives who wrote this, are presumably the Conservatives who are most interested in social policy. Yet they allow phoney figures to go through that state a pregancy rate of 54 percent in the most deprived areas and 19 percent in the least deprived areas.
Don’t these people have any clue at all ? Don’t ANY of them have any teenage children, or know any families with teenage children, or have any thought that these figures are wildly out?
By comparison, imagine if the Conservatives transport specialists approved a document that said that average traffic speeds were about 300 mph in urban areas, or 700 mph on motorways. It’s exactly the same magnitude of mistake.
my sister had a hard time getting pregnant because she has this abnormality in her uterus.`~-
you won’t be able to eat any food that you want during pregnancy as some foods could be harmful to the baby, like foods that ha;’*