Boris Johnson has been corrected by the official statistics watchdog for a second time in less than a month, urging him to stop repeating false employment claims in parliament.
This is the seventh time the prime minister has publicly repeated the false claim that there are more people in work than there were before the pandemic.
This statistic was labelled “misleading” by the Office for Statistics Regulation, as it refers only to the increase in the number of people on payrolls, failing to convey the large drop in number of people who are self-employed.
Johnson claimed that the “single best thing” the government has done to address the cost of living crisis is “making sure that we have millions more people into work.”
“There are 430,000 more in employment now than there were before the pandemic began,” he told the House of Commons during prime minister’s questions on Wednesday.
The statistics watchdog first got involved on February 1 when it sent a letter to Downing Street confirming the claim was incorrect.