Peter Hain was forced to apologise last night after admitting that the number of foreign citizens working in Britain had increased by 300,000 more than he told MPs earlier this month.

Mr Hain, the Work and Pensions Secretary, also admitted that a claim that Britons had taken 2 million of the extra 2.7 million jobs created since Labour came to power could not be proved by official statistics.

In a letter to the Speaker and other MPs, Mr Hain said that the errors had been made in good faith. The upward revisions are certain to further fuel the debate about the Government’s ability, and willingness, to assess levels of migration accurately.

Mr Hain told MPs on October 8 that 800,000 extra foreign nationals were working in Britain in comparison with ten years ago. “Following further careful analysis of the Labour Force Survey, this figure has been revised upwards by 0.3 million. This revised analysis shows that there are an extra 1.1 million foreign nationals in employment in the UK since 1997,” Mr Hain states in his letter of apology.

He continues that his claims on the number of new jobs being taken by British citizens is also not technically accurate.

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said that the revision had been made partly because of “a more rigourous definition of foreign national workers to include, among other things, those who were in the country before 1997 who have subsequently taken up jobs”.

The spokesman also claimed that about half the new jobs had been taken by EU nationals. The Home Office will confirm tomorrow that restrictions on low-skilled workers from Bulgaria and Romania will stay in place.

Ministers admitted recently that the Government was revising estimates for the net number of migrants to Britain from 145,000 a year to 190,000. It emerged that the 25-year projections included estimates of up to 240,000 in the initial years, close to record levels.

Chris Grayling, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, described the statistical revisions as farcical.

“It is difficult to see how we are supposed to have confidence in Labour’s policies if they cannot have confidence in their own figures,” he said.

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