In a Sunday Telegraph article from March, Shapps is quoted saying: "nearly 900,000 people who were on incapacity benefit dropped their claim to the payments, rather than undergo a tough medical test."
It continues: "This is a new figure, nearly a million people have come off incapacity benefit... before going for the test. They take themselves off."
However the UK Statistics Authority said the Tory chairman had "conflated" figures to get that total.
The figure of nearly one million Shapps quoted was in fact the number of new applicants to Employment and Support Allowance who had dropped claims between October 2008 and May 2012. They had not been awarded ESA.
The actual number people who were on incapacity benefit who dropped their claim to the payments was 20,000.
UKSA chair Andrew Dilnot, responding to MP Sheila Gilmore's enquiry, said: "Having reviewed the article and the relevant figures, we have concluded that these statements appear to conflate official statistics relating to new claimants of the ESA with official statistics on recipients of the incapacity benefit (IB) who are being migrated across to the ESA."
He goes on to answer Ms Gilmore's further inquiry over why so many new applicants dropped their claims, questioning Shapps' claim that applications for ESA were dropped because of the government's 'tough new test.'
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