Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have been slammed by the stats watchdog for using dodgy figures.
The Prime Minister claimed the Government had been boasting that the Tories had cut crime by 14%.
In actual fact, prosecutions hit a record low when crime had increased, according to official figures, the UK Statistics Authority noted.
And the 14% figure does not include criminal offences such as fraud and computer misuse, though the Prime Minister did not make that clear.
And Sir David Norgrove, the head of the stats watchdog said the Home Office “presented the statistics to give a positive picture of trends in crime in England and Wales” between June 2019 and September 2021, but did so by not including fraud and computer misuse.
In a letter to Ms Patel and Mr Johnson he added: “The exclusion was stated. However, in the title and in two other places the release refers to a fall in crime, without making clear that this is true only if fraud and computer misuse are excluded."
Fraud and computer misuse offences rose during lockdown.
It comes after the PM repeated false claims about jobs during PMs hours after the data watchdog urged him not to.
And he accused the Labour leader Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, an accusation that has lost him his most loyal advisor, Munira Mirza.
Earlier this week, Mr Johnson told MPs there are more people in work right now than before the pandemic began.
This claim had been branded incorrect by the Office for Statistics Regulation just a day earlier in a letter to No10.
Director Ed Humpherson said the PM was referring to people on payrolls, but this excludes many self-employed.
Mr Humpherson told Downing Street: "The number of people on employer payrolls does not include everyone in work.
"ONS publishes data on the number of people in employment.
"The data for January – March 2020 estimate that 33.0m people were in employment compared with 32.4m people in employment for September – November 2021.
"It is therefore incorrect to state that there were more people in work at the end of this period than the start."
And in the same session Mr Johnson said the Conservatives are "lifting the living wage which their party introduced".
Tory Chancellor George Osborne introduced the National Living Wage in 2016, but this was a rebranded version of the National Minimum Wage for over-25s.
That means the National Living Wage is, legally speaking, the same thing as the National Minimum Wage - which Labour introduced in 1999.
Importantly, the NLW is lower than the ‘real’ Living Wage which has been promoted for years by campaigners as the amount that meets everyday needs.
The real Living Wage is currently £9.90 or £11.05 in London - compared to £8.91 for the government’s National Living Wage, which will rise to £9.50 in April.
