On October 23 The Telegraph headlined that HMRC “writes off £13bn in tax as businesses collapse under Labour”. HMRC’s accounts, reported July 28, show £12.8bn in tax losses for 2025-26, a year of record tax revenue. The headline opens on £13bn and gives it nothing to stand on. No year, no total, no comparison: a naked number, and the first figure you meet sets the scale for everything after it, the habit called anchoring. HMRC’s own accounts, reported on July 28, put tax losses for one tax year, 2025-26, at £12.8bn. In the same year HMRC collected £938.8bn, a record. Set against that, the loss is about 1.4% of the take. The rise is real: £7.2bn the year before, up 77%. The verb and the joining words do the rest. The only matching figure in the coverage, £12.8bn, is not all write-offs: in HMRC’s terms £9.7bn was written off, debts with no means of pursuit, and £3.1bn remitted, debts it decided not to pursue further. Then one small word, as, ties the money to “businesses collapse under Labour”, and the date becomes a culprit. The tell: a small joining word that links a number to a name without saying how. None of the sources here gives a cause. The headline hands the reader two feelings at once: fear for the businesses and anger at a party. The plain sentence the facts allow is duller: tax losses rose to £12.8bn in 2025-26 while revenue hit a record. Duller is the point. The outrage needs the anchor, the present-tense verb and the cause; the record needs only the year and the total beside it.
