“I’ll tell you what’s happened in the last month, we’ve got 300,000 more people off welfare and into work on our Way to Work programme”

That’s what Boris Johnson told MPs at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

He’d been challenged by Keir Starmer on the government’s “vacillation” over the cost of living crisis.

The Labour leader said: “The prime minister keeps saying ‘more help is coming’, but we’ve heard it all before. May 13, he stood there and said ‘we will do more right now’. A week has passed, and there’s been nothing. On April 19, he stood there and said ‘we will do more as soon as we can’. A month has passed, and still: nothing.”

But Boris Johnson’s reply – that 300,000 people have left welfare and got jobs through the government’s Way to Work scheme in the last month – is incorrect.

According to the employment minister, Mims Davies, “280,000 mov[ed] into a job during the first three months of the campaign” – not in a single month, as the prime minister claimed today.

A government spokesperson said: “The Way to Work campaign was launched by the Prime Minister earlier this year to help half a million people into jobs by the end of June.

“This builds on the success of our Plan for Jobs, as well as the unprecedented support provided during the pandemic which have helped to bring the unemployment rate to the lowest level since the 70s.”