At last week’s Trades Union Congress, one of the main subjects of debate was the public sector pay cap.

At the same time, rumours abounded that government ministers were poised to scrap the cap for police and prison officer workers, presumably once again defying Chancellor Hammond; who refused to end the cap when floated some months ago.

Front line police officers are quoted to be £6,000 a year worse off in real terms than they were in 2010 and it is estimated that workers have had a 14 per cent real terms cut in wages over the last seven years. Things have got to change.

Of course, it should not just be police and prison workers who see an end to the cap. Public sector workers across the board have faced crippling finances for far too long. When it’s estimated that top bosses are earning 160 times the average salary of their employees and FTSE100 bosses are on an average of £5 million, the calls for change start to become pervasive.

This can’t be painted as the politics of envy. Since the discovery that there was a magic money tree to bung the Democratic Unionist Party a billion quid to keep the Conservatives in power, spokespeople and commentators singing the virtues of austerity have revealed themselves to be hypocrites. Their red-faced insistence is now increasingly at odds with the views of the voting public.

What’s clear is that austerity has failed as a response to the financial crisis of the last decade, just as it failed to respond to the financial crisis in the years following 1929’s stock market crash. Then it took government expenditure on a re-armament programme to get the economy moving again. Our government is luckier, it should see sense and simply drop the cap to achieve the same.