Most of Scotland’s news outlets, including the Times, Herald, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Express and the BBC, run today with the story that one in three Police Scotland officers intend to leave the force in the next three years, according to a recent survey for the Scottish Police Authority.

(The print edition of the Scotsman makes it the front-page splash, although the article has mysteriously vanished from its website.)

But a couple of pieces of important information are inexplicably missing.

The Times, for example, notes that:

And that’s certainly partly correct.

Above is a page from the actual report, to which we’ve added the blue highlighting. The reason we’ve added it is that the single factor which was cited by far and away the most officers as key to their intention to leave was changes to their pension.

Yet for some reason the Times leaves that out of their list entirely, despite it being cited by two-and-a-half times as many respondents as any other factor.

It also barely gets mentioned in any of the other reports – there’s nothing in the Mail, just a single sentence in the Record, Express and BBC website stories, and it isn’t addressed at all in the BBC’s two-minute TV news package. The Scotsman front page puts it in the strapline but then says nothing in the article other than in a quote from the deputy chief constable, which also features in the Herald.

Readers might wonder why such a key piece of information would be glossed over in such a manner. And as it happens, we may have the answer to that one:

The changes to police pension arrangements which have so dispirited the force were imposed on it by Westminster two years ago, despite the Scottish Government having been willing to fund a continuation of the previous policy. And while a casual viewer might feel that was a significantly newsworthy facet to the story, Scotland’s media uniformly appears to disagree.

It’s obviously concerning that so many Scottish police officers want to leave the service. However, readers may also feel that that statistic lacks context, and might be better seen in the perspective of how it compares to those in the rest of the UK.

And as luck would have it, we can help there too.

A study published by the Stevens Independent Commission in 2013, which polled over 14,000 serving officers in England and Wales, found that:

So the story seems to be that after Westminster-imposed changes to their pension rights, against the wishes of the Scottish Government, 33% of Scottish officers are thinking about quitting – but a whopping 56% of their counterparts elsewhere in Britain are. Scotland’s police are still 70% happier than those in England and Wales.

Yet half the media isn’t mentioning the overwhelming main reason for Scottish police unhappiness – the UK government’s destructive interference – at all, the other half is skipping over it with a mumbled passing mention somewhere halfway down the article, and absolutely nobody is putting the news into a relevant context. (Most of them being too busy with a months-long barrage of negative stories about the service.)

We can only speculate as to why. As ever, readers will make their own judgements.