Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to her oral contribution of 7 September 2021, Official report, column 185, whether her Department has made an assessment of the level of wage growth which discounts the impact of furlough during the covid-19 outbreak; and if she will publish the legal advice referred to in her oral contribution.

Legal advice is privileged. This has been the situation under successive governments.

As the Office for National Statistics have stated, there is no single accepted approach to assessing underlying growth. They have published information that identifies temporary factors, called base and compositional effects, which have been caused by the pandemic and have increased the headline growth rate in earnings above the underlying rate. They have published a range of possible growth rates, but stressed that these should be treated with caution