Total pay, including bonuses, now averages £494 a week, compared with £525 in February 2008, as the financial crisis began to deepen.

Thomas Pugh, UK economist at Capital Economics warned that worse news could be in store for the jobs market.

“We suspect that this could mark the peak of employment growth as the Brexit uncertainty reached its crescendo ... And the surveys turned down sharply in March.”

But so far the jobs market has held up better than expected. The number of people unemployed fell 79,000 between December 2018 and February 2019 from a year earlier, taking the jobless figure to 1.34 million.