A year ago Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to grow the economy. As part of this pledge, he promised to create better-paid jobs. He said that we’d all know that ‘things are getting better’. And he went further, saying that there’d be ‘No tricks … no ambiguity … we will either have achieved them or not’.

Unfortunately there is ambiguity in how his pledge might be measured and checked.

One way of looking at it is that most workers have been awarded or gone on strike to achieve a pay rise this year. Provisional data for 2023 released at the end of the year by the Office for National Statistics shows that jobs right across the economy have seen a pay rise. By the end of 2023 average annual growth in regular pay was 7.3%. However pay rises are higher for some workers than for others. Moreover, adjusted for inflation, average annual growth in pay real terms was only 1.4%. Some workers therefore will still feel worse off now than they were a year ago.

The other way of looking at it, and the way surely implied by Sunak, is that there would be more high paid jobs created and the number of low paid would shrink. Low paid jobs are those paying less than two-thirds of median hourly pay. High paid jobs pay more than 1.5 times the median hourly pay. The provisional data for 2023 is mixed, with good news and bad news. The proportion of jobs that are low paid fell to 8.9% from 10.7% in 2022. However the proportion of jobs that are high paid also fell very slightly in 2023, down 0.4% to 23.4%. Using this measure, there are fewer low paid jobs but more work is needed from Sunak and his government if more high paid jobs are to be created and the pledge to be met.