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.
- Credit: FullFact
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.
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