Tom Calver

Tom is the Data Editor of The Times and The Sunday Times. He leads a team of eleven data and visual journalists, and writes across both papers.

Since September, Tom has been writing a weekly column in The Sunday Times called Go Figure, where he takes a challenging question and attempts to reframe our perceptions of the world through data. His most successful one, published in October, compared the incomes of British pensioners to those from other countries.

There is a prevailing narrative that UK retirees are incredibly well off; in income terms, this simply isn’t true. The typical over-65 takes home far less money than those in Germany, France, Italy, and many other countries. While house prices and private pensions have made some pensioners very wealthy, Tom showed that it is a myth that pensioners have been made rich off the state. In terms of guest traffic, this piece was the best-performing Comment piece published by The Sunday Times in the past six months.

Tom's second submission showcases the best of his general election analysis, initially published at 5am on Friday morning then updated through to Saturday. When thousands of data points from hundreds of constituencies appeared overnight, Tom demonstrated his ability to spot the key narratives that defined the election. Tom was one of the first to point out just how shallow Labour’s majority was in terms of vote margins in each seat, and his quickfire demographic analysis showed Labour did well in spite of Starmer’s unpopularity, and how Labour had suffered in Muslim constituencies.

Although this is a shared byline, Tom wrote the words, built more than half of the charts, leveraged the rest of his team to produce the rest, and curated the page so that it made a huge amount of data digestible. His social media posts of the key findings from this page were seen more than a million times, and earned him the prestigious Peston "Geek Of The Week" accolade.

Finally, every month, the NHS publishes figures on how many people are waiting for NHS treatment. But Tom went further, identifying the NHS areas that were struggling the most – data that no other journalists had properly looked at. His analysis showed that more than one in five people in the city of Southend were waiting for some kind of treatment, the highest of any area. He then reported from the city, using Southend as a microcosm to explain the impacts that large waiting lists have on the rest of the country, from economic inactivity to low quality of life. The print version of this story appeared on page 1 of the Sunday Times in November 2023.