Can consumers continue to lean against the real wage squeeze?

This has been no ‘normal’ consumer recovery. The emphasis on rising employment levels, rather than wage growth, to drive the improvement in real incomes means that while the collective spending power of UK households has strengthened, many individual households continue to feel squeezed. A tightening labour market and emerging skills shortages will improve workers' wage bargaining power, but progress will be gradual and, for many workers, limited by the impact of further strong growth in the labour supply. Therefore, with little scope for households to further reduce the share of income saved, consumer spending growth is likely to remain relatively subdued, lagging well behind the growth rates achieved over the decade prior to the financial crisis.