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Hello and welcome to your coffee house shots. The spectator's daily politics podcast

on Isabelle Hardman and this is the Sunday Roundup. This morning the Chancellor of the

Duchy of Lancaster, Oliver Dalton, took to the airwaves and asked the unions representing

nurses and ambulance workers to call off their strikes. Dalton told Laura Coonsburg that the

collective amount being asked for by unions would take the government's total bill to £28

billion. Coonsburg challenged him on how the government had reached its conclusions.

How have you worked out that it would cost every household a £1,000 a year to give public

sector workers an inflation matching pay rise? So we have taken the level of inflation,

which is currently about 10-11% and we have projected that forward for next year because that's

what you'd expect it to apply to and that would give £1,000 for every family if we matched that

for the public sector. Well we've had a look at your numbers as you'd expect and we've asked the

Treasury also how they worked it out. Now your figures have used the inflation figure of 11%,

which is just for one month though it would be our actually projects that next year inflation

will be far less than that, not to speak of it when you're normally working about paying

negotiations. You've got an average of inflation not just one month which is what you have done,

so it's not £28 billion is it? Well the requests from the striking unions across the board is

generally about CPI and the CPI level inflation is currently between 10-11% and actually if you look

in the case of nurses they want RPI plus 5%, actually that gives you 19%, so you could actually

argue that we're underestimating the number. Well you think it might be more than that, if that's

...