Tory chairman Shapps rapped over latest misleading remarks

In fact, official figures showed that just 19,700 IB recipients withdrew their claims before facing work capability assessments as part of the transfer to the new employment and support allowance (ESA) between March 2011 and May 2012, said UK Statistics Authority chairman Andrew Dilnot.

Mr Dilnot said that the Tory chairman appeared to have “conflated” figures for IB claimants being moved onto the new benefit with those for new applicants for ESA who had not previously been in receipt of incapacity benefit.

Some 878,300 of these claims were closed before undergoing assessment over a three-and-a-half year period from October 2008 to May 2012.

Shadow Work And Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne called on Mr Shapps to apologise for “trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes” in the latest of a series of cases in which Conservative ministers have been rapped over the knuckles for misusing statistics.

Earlier this month Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith was rebuked for claiming that figures showed the Government’s benefits cap had driven 8,000 people to return to work.

In February, Mr Dilnot said David Cameron was wrong to claim in a party political broadcast that state debt was falling. And in December last year, he asked Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to stop claiming that he had increased the NHS budget in real terms in each of the last two years.

Mr Dilnot’s latest comments came in a letter to Labour MP Sheila Gilmore, who raised a complaint over a Conservative press release issued in March this year under the headline: “Nearly 1 million people drop incapacity benefit claim before medical test.”

Ms Gilmore also complained that reports of the issue implied that those dropping claims were doing so because they had never really been ill.

In his letter, Mr Dilnot pointed to research by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which found that “an important reason” why claims were withdrawn before assessments were completed was that “the person recovered and either returned to work or claimed a benefit more appropriate to their situation”.

Mr Byrne said: “This is a Government that doesn’t like to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

“Grant Shapps may know a thing or two about making things up but it really is outrageous that the Tories have been caught yet again misusing statistics for their own ends.”