In a speech delivered to the NHS Confederation last week, the Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting claimed the NHS owned ‘1 in 10’ pagers still in use across the world. Considering there are two million pagers in the USA alone, this maths seems a touch wooly.

They then refused to offer the evidence for their ‘extensive FOI-based research’ when Full Fact made an attempt to verify the claim. If you consider the 79,000 pagers Labour say are in use within the NHS, it would represent just one in 26 of the just over two million in the US and UK, not even beginning to take into account the number of pagers which may be in service outside of the NHS in the UK, and across the rest of the world.

This is not the first time a Labour frontbencher has been caught out by arithmetic, with Rachel Reeves, Jonathan Ashworth, and Rachel Reeves again all falling victim to problems with basic maths. Hopefully the new ‘Research Manager’ the party are advertising for will be proficient in basic calculations…