Leave campaigners repeatedly argued during the referendum campaign that quitting the EU would drive up pay in Britain.
A letter signed by Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Gisela Stuart in May 2016 said: “Wages will be higher for working people outside the EU… because pay will no longer be undercut by uncontrolled migration.”
Ms Amiot said: “It is true at the end of the day. Obviously, we have seen immigration is still quite high on a net basis but it’s not the same immigrants, so the skill set they bring is a bit different from before.”
Net migration reached a record high of 606,000 in the year to June 2022. However, many of these arrivals were either higher-skilled workers coming to fill hard-to-recruit roles or people arriving for humanitarian reasons from Ukraine, Hong Kong or fleeing persecution from elsewhere.
Jack Kennedy, a senior economist at hiring website Indeed, said he believed Brexit was “certainly likely to be a contributory factor” towards faster than expected wage growth for lower-skilled jobs.
Mr Kennedy said: “Our own Indeed wage tracker data shows that a lot of the categories where wage growth remains highest are the ones where we know Brexit has been an aggravating factor in terms of being able to fill staffing gaps.
“A lot of the lower paid sectors are seeing pretty strong rates of wage growth of between 7pc and 10pc in our data.”
Economists emphasised that Brexit is one of several factors contributing to surprisingly strong wage growth in the UK.
Other factors driving up wage growth include a wave of early retirement post-Covid and an increase in long-term sickness post-pandemic, both of which have contributed to a shortage of workers.
Ms Amiot said: “Wage growth is much stronger than what usual drivers would tell us. So this suggests the labour market is tighter than we think because the labour supply dynamics have changed.”
The Bank of England may have failed to predict just how rapidly wages would rise in response to high inflation because it underestimated the impact of Brexit, she added.
