Boris Johnson has been branded a “dodgy” Prime Minister by Keir Starmer for coming to the Commons with figures that do not tally with his own government’s record.
The two party leaders accused each other of using misleading statistics as they clashed at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Starmer started off by demanding to know when the software for the coronavirus phone would be up and running and pointed to Germany, which launched its own app in mid-June, as a country that had already sorted a track and trace system.
The Labour leader said 33,000 people were estimated to have Covid-19 in England, but just over 10,000 people with virus were reached by contact tracers.
Starmer asked: “If two-thirds with covid-19 were not reached there’s a big problem isn’t there?”
But Johnson accused Starmer of making “misleading” claims about the UK’s coronavirus track and trace programme.
The Prime Minister argued that his Labour opposite had been “stunned by the success” of the Government’s plan to test and map the contacts of people with Covid-19.
That was despite ministers last week announcing a major u-turn on a planned smart phone app to go alongside it.
He then challenged Sir Keir to name a single country in the world that has a functional contact tracing app “because there isn’t one”.
The Labour leader shot back: “Germany - 12 million downloads. I checked that overnight.”
The Labour leader held up slide from the government’s own coronavirus press conference as evidence of his figures and rounded on the Prime Minister over child poverty figures.
The Children’s Commissioner branded Johnson’s claims at last week’s PMQs - that poverty had fallen under the Tories and 400,000 fewer families were in poverty - as “mostly false”.
Starmer told the PM: “He’s been found out. He either dodges the question or he gives dodgy answers.
“No more witnesses - I rest my case. Will the PM do the decent thing and correct the record in relation to child poverty?”
But instead of correcting the record, the PM made fresh claims about child poverty that do not appear to tally with his own government’s official statistics.
The Tory leader said: “I’m happy to point out to m’learned friend there are 100,000 fewer children in absolute poverty.”
He added there were “500,000 children falling below thresholds of low income and material deprivation”.
Neither of those claims appear to tally with the government’s own official statistics.
Official statistics show there were 3.7 million children in absolute poverty after housing costs in 2019, the most recent year figures are available.
That is 100,000 higher than the first year of Tory government in 2010 and not 100,000 lower, as Boris Johnson claimed.
Afterwards Downing Street acknowledged that other countries had produced apps, but said they did not “fully and reliably” record contacts in a way that would allow officials to advise people whether to self-isolate or not.
