The Telegraph has removed a story about a family who had to cut down on their five annual holidays because of private school fees – after it turned out it was fake.
Published on May 25, the piece was titled “We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays” and was written by a freelance journalist.
Whilst the piece was based on a real interview, an investigation by the Press Gazette has found that the source gave the reporter a fake name and duped them with the tale.
The article told the story of banker ‘Al Moy’ and his family who were unable to go on five holidays a year because of Labour’s introduction of VAT on private school fees, despite the fact they had a household income of £345,000.
Moy and his wife Alexandra have two children, Ali and Harry, at fee-paying schools. The piece told how the family have had to switch from Waitrose to Sainsbury’s and cut down on their number of holidays abroad so they could afford the private school fees after the addition of VAT.
Doubts were raised about the legitimacy of the piece though when it was pointed out that the image used was in fact a stock image take 13 years ago. Journalist Ian Fraser was also unable to find any trace of the Moy couple online.
The Press Gazette reports that the story was actually based on an interview with a man who deceived the Telegraph journalist with a fake name and story.
The interview was set up by a PR working for financial planning firm Saltus, who had carried out research estimating the average liftetime cost of school fees following the addition of VAT by Keir Starmer’s government.
According to the Press Gazette, the freelance reporter who wrote the piece was commissioned to do so by the Money section of the Telegraph. The freelancer conducted the interview but was not involved in the image selection for the article, which has now been withdrawn by the Telegraph.
A spokesperson for Telegraph Media Group said: “On 25th May, we published an article in our Money section based on a case study. After publication it became clear that during his conversations and other communications with us the case study had provided us with false information. We unpublished the article and started a thorough investigation.
“We take the quality and integrity of our journalism very seriously but it is clear that our internal processes were not strong enough on this story and we are taking steps to ensure this does not happen again.”