A FACT-CHECKER has found a Tory government minister made a false claim about employment figures in the UK – despite Boris Johnson having been previously censured on multiple occasions for repeating the same claim.

Therese Coffey, the Work and Pensions Secretary, claimed in a video which is still live on her department’s Twitter account that employment was up compared to before the pandemic.

This claim, which has been found to be “false” by Full Fact, previously led the Prime Minister to be publicly admonished by the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA).

READ MORE: Boris Johnson insists his ‘misleading’ jobs stats give correct ‘overall picture’

Ed Humpherson, the director-general of the UKSA, told The Observer that there had been several “informal discussions” behind the scenes about the Prime Minister’s incorrect use of employment data before his colleague had publicly intervened.

Johnson has made the false claim to Parliament on at least nine separate occasions.

Confronted about this by Labour MP Stephen Timms, Johnson claimed he had taken “steps to correct the record”. However, this was also untrue.

Timms tweeted after the pair’s exchange: “Boris Johnson has said repeatedly in Parliament since November that unemployment is now lower than at the start of the pandemic. This is untrue.

“When I raised this with him, he accepted it was untrue, and told me he has corrected the record. It turns out this is also untrue!”

Despite the Prime Minister’s admission that the claim is untrue, it was repeated by Coffey in a video published by her department on April 10.

The DWP Secretary said: “As we emerge from the pandemic, one of my key priorities is jobs, jobs, jobs. And despite the challenges of the last two years, unemployment is down and employment is up.”

Full Fact found that it was correct to claim that unemployment is down, as it fell by 28,000 (0.1 percentage points) between the three months to February 2020 and the three months to January 2022.

However, the number of people in employment fell by 580,000 and the employment rate (the proportion of people aged 16 to 64 who are in work) fell by 1 percentage point over the same period.

Full Fact noted that it “has repeatedly written about this false claim which has been made by Boris Johnson and other ministers”.

A DWP spokesperson said they did not intend to take their post down, claiming that "at the time the video was posted, employment was up [by 0.1%] on the previous quarter".