16:04

Nicola Sturgeon has been reprimanded by the UK’s statistics regulator for using unpublished data to defend her government’s widely-criticised performance on hospital waiting times.

Ed Humpherson, the director general for regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, wrote to the Scottish government’s chief statistician, Roger Halliday, today to chide the first minister for quoting figures which could not be independently verified by outsiders and had not come from NHS Scotland’s statistics service.

Humpherson said the authority had previously complained about ministerial use of this unpublished data, produced for Sturgeon by her officials, when it had been used on another occasion at Holyrood. He said:

Waiting times are a major concern to patients and their families. The statistics informing debates about them must therefore be trustworthy, of suitable quality, and useful. We are therefore extremely disappointed that it has been necessary for us to intervene in this way.

He said the figures were already due to be officially released by the NHS’s information services division in May 2019. Jumping the gun, without clear guidance about the data’s quality and limitations, risked undermining public confidence, he said.

Willie Rennie, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, urged Sturgeon to apologise at first minister’s questions. She would not do so, but said her government would “reflect carefully on anything that the Office for Statistics Regulation says. She said:

The statistics that I used were accurate and, as I understand it, are available to anybody on request and will be published by ISD Scotland.