Two Norfolk MPs including Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis have been named on a list of politicians who have issued false claims and failed to correct the official records.
Great Yarmouth representative Mr Lewis and his Conservative colleague Jerome Mayhew, MP for Broadland, were featured on the list compiled by fact-checking journalists at independent charity FullFact..
It comes as Mr Lewis wrote in The Times yesterday [MON] that “trust in our politics is at rock bottom” and that “trust in politics, politicians and the political system can only be restored by matching words with actions”.
But it has been 61 days since Mr Lewis made a false claim about employment figures and he has not yet corrected it despite having the error brought to his attention by FullFact.
During interviews with Sky News and BBC Breakfast on May 17 Mr Lewis said: “We’re seeing more people in work, even than we saw before Covid.”
This is incorrect. According to the Office of National Statistics, (ONS) there are more people on payroll, but the total number of people in work including self-employed is 504,000 below the pre-pandemic figure.
The overall employment when he spoke was still 0.9 percentage points lower than the three month period to February 2020.
In a statement accompanying the data, the ONS’s director of economic statistics Darren Morgan made very clear: “Total employment, while up on the quarter, remains below its pre-pandemic level.
“Since the start of the pandemic, around half a million more people have completely disengaged from the labour market.”
But when challenged on his claim by BBC presenter Sally Nugent, Mr Lewis said: “Unemployment actually is below where it was before Covid. Employment figures have got back to where they were pre-Covid”.
Mr Lewis and his staff declined to reply to our several attempts to contact him for this article.
Mr Mayhew made a similar claim in a Commons debate in January, 173 days ago, saying “there is now more employment in this country than in pre-pandemic times—over 400,000 more jobs—and we should celebrate that".
Mr Mayhew told us: “Factual errors do sometimes occur in the unscripted back and forth of debate but should be corrected when the opportunity arises, if significant.
“FullFact pointed out that the data that I had referred to actually only referenced employment on payroll rather than the entire employment sector.
"They were right and I acknowledged my error to them, but did not think that this in itself warranted a formal correction of the record.”
He declined to say whether he would now correct the record.
Other MPs to feature on the FullFact list include former Tory leadership hopefuls Suella Braverman and Sajid Javid, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner, and prime minister Boris Johnson - who appears on the list four times.
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