Shortages may last until Christmas, PM admits

The Conservative party conference is just beginning in Manchester and, as is tradition, the Prime Minister sat down with Andrew Marr to discuss some of the most important issues facing the country. Marr began by asking about the case of Sarah Everard, who was abducted, raped and murdered by serving policeman Wayne Couzens. Johnson told Marr that the police as a whole are ‘overwhelmingly trustworthy’ and that he would ‘stop at nothing’ to reform the criminal justice system in order to ‘get more rapists behind bars’:

‘Wages are growing’

Marr challenged Johnson over statistics that he gave on the state of the economy. The Prime Minister claimed that after ‘ten years of flatlining’ paycheques, lower earners were seeing their wage packages grow as employers suffer a labour shortage. 

The PM explained that issues in abattoirs and on petrol station forecourts were a necessary condition of reaching higher wages — and he pledged that his government would not return to the era of ‘uncontrolled immigration’ to help mitigate the lack of workers.