The prime minister said he did “not believe people will be short of food” amid reports of some empty supermarket shelves and rising energy prices.
Boris Johnson told the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, that wages were rising for the first time in decades” and that was a good thing”.
Speaking in New York, he added supply chain problems were of a “short-term nature” but said the “market across the world is going to start clearing these problems”.
The BBC’s head of statistics, Robert Cuffe, says the PM is incorrect to say wages are rising “for the first time in decades”.
Wages have been rising – and rising faster than the cost of living – most of the time since 2014, he says. They also rose steadily throughout most of the 2000s, under Labour, up until the financial crash of 2008.
While there has been a record rise over the last 12 months, a good chunk of that growth is a statistical fluke, Cuffe says, as wages this time last year were artificially low because of the pandemic.
