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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the spectator's daily politics podcast.

I'm Natasha Farros and I'm joined by Isabel Harman and Fraser Nelson.

This morning the wage growth figures were announced and it's hit a 22-year high and this has

been caused mostly by the public sector pay increases. Fraser, there's been a blog written by

our data editor Michael Simmons on Coffee House just laying out the graphs and how this has happened.

What does this mean for the economy? Well the great thing about Michael's blog is that he uses

the spectator data hub metrics which put a very different perspective in the story than the one

most people have heard. For example it's not all pay growth has gone to a record high, it's

public sector pay growth. The private sector pay growth isn't growing faster than it was in

the post-pandemic bounce but the public sector is at 9.6% that's a huge figure and it's a pretty

big because last time we heard of it public sector was growing at 6% that it all doesn't wish

up to 9.6. Now what made that huge increase? It was as Michael identifies a glitch.

This isn't the fact that everybody in this public sector has all of a sudden been given a lot

more money. This was due to the fact that in order to get out of the nurses strike the government

offered a one-off bonus in June. It's quite a generous bonus to nurses of between one and a half

to about three and a half grand depending on how much they were paid. Now because of a number of

people who work for the NHS something like 1.4 million that bonus completely distorted the figures.

For sometimes this could happen in the economics. I mean we're now familiar with

...