it specifically effects what are called ‘manual and clerical workers’.

The US Labour Department produces such figures for most of the big cities and for five big census regions. In the US, it is these localised inflation rates that are used for pay rises and the like.

The ‘national’ rate is only used for international comparisons. When you have been tracking inflation on such a localised basis and for so long, the sort of the regionalised anomalies we have here in the UK do not emerge.

You can trust the figures.

The US indices even register the impact of house-price inflation on the pockets of the working masses. Hence housing is a much bigger part of the basket or formula used to represent the spending needs of Americans.

And even with such housing inflation taken into account, US inflation has usually been kept below ours. The Chancellor pays a kind of tribute to all this by regularly having appointed Americans to roles around the Bank of England.

But what insight from this they have actually brought to policy making in Treadneedle Street, is hard to see. It is the variation in this house-price inflation across England that has pushed up real inflation for hard working families.

Housing inflation has happened in waves spreading across England, and it has been these regional anomalies that have driven inflation up by stealth.

These regional anomalies are at the core of the pay issue. The Chancellor has regularly brought up the idea of having different pay settlements on a region-by-region basis since 2003.

But he flinched from spending the money in the Office of National Statistics to work out the regional inflation indices that would be needed to foster confidence in going down that route.

The idea was that the cost of living rises faster in the south of England than in the north. So it would be good for Mr Brown to be able to get away with giving public employees a reduced pay rise in regions like ours, to help him give a bigger rise to workers in London and the south.

But pay generally has gone up in southern England and all it has done is fed the inflation monster.

London is now in many ways an economy that does not pay people enough money to actually live there.

Hence we have commuting on a unique scale, commuting that is sucking rail-network investment out of most of the rest the country.

All this is in need of a serious re-think.

Anyhow, instead of pushing for an inflation busting payaward for this year, the more sensible thing for the unions to do is to use their new relationship with Mr Brown – their own preferred new Prime Minister – to seek to have him revise the way inflation is measured.

This is to have indices that reflect the regionalisation of inflation that Mr Brown has himself highlighted, and that properly reflects the price of running a household in today’s reality. Next year they could then begin a proper dialogue with both the Government and the Bank about how we control the very real English inflation that will then stand exposed.

We hope we can prompt both unions and employers to look at the Regional Prosperity and Inflation Framework, which we in LWM are trying to float.

The trade unions still have a voice in what is left of the West Midlands Regional Assembly, where they have long had a remit from this Government to speak to other stakeholder interests in this region, and to tell Government about the needs of our regional economy.

Neither a one-off inflation busting pay settlement nor a pay sacrifice will have any lasting benefit to anyone.

But the adoption of some sort of new prosperity and inflation framework would allow Government and stakeholders to better find a way towards a lasting and sustainable prosperity for our region and beyond.

* Andrew Lydon runs the Regional Prosperity and Inflation Framework project for Localise West Midlands – a West Midlands based thinktank & consultancy. This work has been initially funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.