Fact check: Resident doctors’ pay and AI-generated soldier video

This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.

Have resident doctors had a 21% real-terms pay cut?

Resident doctors in England began a five-day strike on Wednesday, amid claims from the British Medical Association (BMA) that their pay has fallen in real terms by about 21% since 2008/9.

This figure relies on a number of questionable assumptions, however. In particular, it’s calculated using an unreliable measure of inflation. Other measures suggest the drop has been less. New analysis from Full Fact, which has been independently verified and uses a measure of inflation backed by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), suggests the fall has been more like 6-7%.

Ever since resident doctors began striking over pay in 2023, the dispute has centred on how their pay has changed in real terms – in other words, accounting for inflation.

The BMA’s estimate uses the Retail Prices Index (RPI), which the national statistician has called “a very poor measure of general inflation”, and which the UK Statistics Authority says is “not fit for purpose”, adding “we strongly discourage its use”.

The standard measure of inflation is the Consumer Prices Index, or CPI, which is classified as an “official statistic”. But the BMA has said it uses RPI because many of its members have student loans, the interest on which is calculated using RPI. BMA chairman Dr Thomas Dolphin also said in a recent radio interview that the union prefers RPI “because we think you’ve got to include housing costs in the measure”.

A special version of CPI, called CPIH, does attempt to include housing costs, and this is what the Institute for Fiscal Studies has used to estimate the real changes in doctors’ pay. The Nuffield Trust think tank uses CPI, but says results using CPIH would give “similar results”.

The RSS has often argued that CPI is not well suited to the BMA’s purpose, because it is more of a macroeconomic indicator to gauge the “general performance of the economy” than a guide to the real costs of living that households face.

In a letter last week, the RSS argued that “the solution” to these problems is an alternative, relatively new measure of inflation: the Household Costs Index (HCI). This measure is classified as an official statistic in development, meaning it may be revised if its methodology is changed in future. But HCI does include both housing costs and the direct costs of student loans, and is published regularly by the ONS.

Full Fact’s calculations using HCI—which have been independently verified by Jill Leyland, a former vice president of the RSS who now represents it on the National Statistician’s Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices—suggest that the erosion of resident doctors’ pay is about a third as much as the BMA has estimated.

The BMA’s estimate also decides to measure the inflation for each year according to the annual rate in its final month. But Ms Leyland told us she believes this isn’t really the best thing to do, as prices can change on a monthly basis. This is why the Nuffield Trust made its estimate by averaging the rate of inflation for all 12 months of each year.

Choosing one specific month, instead of averaging, can make a substantial difference. When we repeated our analysis using the average for the previous year instead, it reduced the estimated erosion from about 9% to 6-7%.

In any event, both how and when you measure inflation can have a serious impact on the calculation. By our estimates, the figures range from around 3% (using CPIH on a 12-month average) to around 21% (using RPI and April figures, as the BMA has).

Finally, as the Nuffield Trust and others have pointed out, the change in resident doctors’ pay is sensitive to the baseline you compare it with.

The BMA has said that 2008 was “when our pay cuts began”, which appears to be broadly true. This means the BMA has chosen to compare its members’ pay with one of the high points, in real terms, in the last 35 years. Looking this far back also means that most of today’s resident doctors won’t themselves have experienced the whole cut.

Dr Sarah Cumbers, chief executive of the RSS, said: “Full Fact’s calculations underline how much the choice of inflation index matters. CPI and CPIH are useful for macroeconomic analysis, but they were never intended for uprating. RPI, which was designed for that purpose, no longer provides a reliable measure.

“This makes it all the more important that the ONS completes its work on the Household Costs Indices, which are designed to reflect inflation as households actually experience it.”

When we put our conclusions to the BMA, it told us: “Different measures and calculations will of course produce different results.

“We use the methodology and measures we believe best reflect the pay erosion our members have experienced since 2008/9 and the living expenses they face.”

Video of soldier shouting at police officer is AI-generated

A viral video which appears to show a uniformed British soldier shouting at a police officer about arresting “people for words” and freedom of speech was created with artificial intelligence.

The clip has been circulating widely on social media, including on X where one post sharing it has 16,000 reposts and more than three million views.

However Dr Siwei Lyu, an expert in digital media forensics at University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, told Full Fact there are a number of signs this video is not real and it was likely created with AI, including unnatural facial expressions, errors on the soldier’s uniform and a glitchy background.

And when we asked OpenAI about the video, it told us it had taken appropriate action on its AI video generation software Sora, which included banning a user.