“I’m not saying nobody gets a pay rise, don’t get me wrong. But what I am saying is, we do need to see restraint in pay bargaining, otherwise it will get out of control.”
Back in May, his Chief Economist Huw Pill got in trouble for expressing the sentiment thusly:
“Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they're worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing energy costs through on to customers,” which Bailey had to walk back.
Last week on Sky News, he was pitching a version of that same position, though, that balanced calls for wage restraint with calls for companies to exercises restraint on profit margins also:
“We've got to get and we will get inflation back to its target. To do that … we cannot continue to have the current level of wage increases, and we can't have companies seeking to rebuild profit margins which mean prices continue to go up at their current rates.”