Former defence and education secretary Sir Gavin Williamson has won a complaint against a Birmingham Live article that described a village in his constituency as the “grimmest” in the UK.
The ruling came months after Mail Online removed its own similar story about Featherstone, South Staffordshire, which had been provided by agency SWNS – also following a complaint by Williamson.
However the description of Featherstone as the “grimmest” was not part of the complaints.
Press regulator IPSO ruled that the description in a Birmingham Live article of “arson hit infrastructure” in Featherstone, with a bus stop “torched not long after its installation”, was inaccurate.
The website later acknowledged the bus stop had been “burnt out”. Williamson explained that the fire started because of a lorry transporting bales of hay that caught on fire and fell onto the bus stop.
Birmingham Live noted during the investigation process that two days after the article was published, a fire was deliberately started and a derelict pub was burnt down along the same road as the bus stop.
However IPSO said it could not rely on this, as at the time of publication it did not appear that any fire had been deliberately started.
The regulator added that the inaccuracy was significant because “reporting as established fact that there had been an arson attack had the clear potential to adversely affect the locally community”.
IPSO ordered Birmingham Live to publish a correction, giving it the choice of putting it below the headline if it continued to publish the article without amendment, or as a footnote if it removed the inaccuracies.
IPSO said the other part of Williamson’s complaint, that Featherstone was “surrounded by three prisons”, did not breach the Editors’ Code of Practice after reviewing the institutions’ addresses and the Government description of one of them.
IPSO did not determine whether the similar Mail Online article had breached the Editors’ Code of Practice because Williamson was satisfied by the publisher’s offer to take it down.
Read the full Birmingham Live IPSO ruling here.
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