Conservative and Labour MPs repeat misleading claims on media round

20 May 2022 | Full Fact's weekly news
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FACT CHECK
Conservative and Labour MPs repeat misleading claims on media round

This past week we've covered new versions of two misleading high-profile political claims which we've seen repeated time and again. One from the Conservatives, and one from Labour. We've checked these respective claims before when they were made by other politicians. Multiple times we’ve asked for them to be corrected, without success. This isn’t good enough.

The claims 👇

🔵 Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis:
"We're seeing more people in work, even than we saw before Covid."

Regular readers of this newsletter will be familiar with this false claim by now. It’s the one that the Prime Minister has repeated in Parliament ten times. New figures have been released since he last made this claim, but it still remains untrue.

There are 504,000 fewer people in work now, including the self-employed, than there were before the pandemic. The overall employment rate, while up on the last quarter, is still 0.9 percentage points lower than the three month period to February 2020.

Mr Lewis went on to say that “unemployment actually is below where it was before Covid.” Other ministers have made similar claims about unemployment in recent days. Perhaps confusingly, this is correct as both can be down at the same time.

The employment rate refers to the proportion of people aged 16 to 64 who do at least one hour of paid work per week. The unemployment rate is the number of unemployed people divided by the number of employed and unemployed people.

Total unemployment in the three months to March 2022 is down by 107,000 compared to the three months to February 2020.

🔴 Shadow justice secretary Steve Reed:
“The Chancellor’s Spring Statement [...] left the average household £2,600 a year worse off.”

The Labour MP made this claim three times in one morning, on the BBC, ITV and Sky. The average household in the UK is expected to be significantly worse off this year. But independent estimates suggest the fall is likely to be less than Labour’s figure.

Labour reached this figure by adding together estimates for rising costs from tax, energy, petrol, food and mortgage payments. An obvious problem here is that these five items don’t cover all changes to income and expenditure that a typical household might expect to face.

Although of course not everyone’s wages are going up, Labour is talking about an average household. The cash value of some wages and benefits are going up, so this should be accounted for, but weren’t factored into this calculation.

There are other problems with the calculation which we go into in more detail in our fact check.
🔵 Employment figures ([link removed])
🔴 Cost of living figures ([link removed])
None of the many MPs we have contacted about these claims previously have corrected their mistakes. Indeed, in many cases, our emails are ignored entirely.

We will continue to ask politicians to correct themselves when they get things wrong. Help us change the process for correcting the record in Parliament. If you haven’t already, sign our petition:

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FACT CHECK
False claims spread about Pfizer’s “data dump” ([link removed])

A widely shared false claim that a “data dump” of new documents reveals that Pfizer’s Covid vaccine has an efficacy rate of just 12% is based on a misinterpretation of a document published in 2020.

The “data dump” refers to the release of new documents from Pfizer and the FDA starting in November 2021. But this 12% figure actually comes from older documents that have been in the public domain since December 2020. It’s inaccurate as it’s based on a misinterpretation of data from the initial trials of the vaccine.

This is unlikely to be the last time we fact check Pfizer’s “data dump,” which is being widely discussed in certain online communities.

The 12% figure ([link removed])
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FACT CHECK
Green levy costs do not make up 25% of energy bills ([link removed])

"We need to get rid of the green levies, that are 25% of our energy bills."
- MP Robert Halfon on the Today programme

This figure is inaccurate. Green levies represent a proportion of environmental and social obligation costs, which account for less than 8% of an average energy bill’s costs under the current price cap.

They did, however, make up 25% of the average electricity bill in 2021. After facing criticism on social media for his claim, Mr Halfon clarified that green levies comprised 25% of electricity bills.

However, claiming that this 25% was solely for green levies on energy bills, as he said on the radio, is still inaccurate. Others have made this claim too, uncorrected, including UKIP.

How green levies work ([link removed])
MORE FACT CHECKS
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All the best,
Team Full Fact

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