The House | If Burnham is serious about the cost of living, he must act boldly on food prices

Supermarket in 2026 (Alamy)

4 min read37 min

In April of this year, over 90 per cent of those who reported an increase in their cost of living cited food being more expensive as one of the reasons. Prices for food and non-alcoholic drinks have risen 38 per cent since 2020, a greater increase than overall inflation (31 per cent), and some experts think we could see this become a 50 per cent cumulative increase by the end of this year thanks to the war in Iran.

Food inflation is not just a result of geopolitical shocks disrupting supply chains and raising energy costs. It’s also driven by more persistent factors like climate change – with the UK losing the equivalent of a year’s supply of bread for every person due to the impact of extreme weather on domestic wheat harvests. This means the government’s task is not just to help people with the present crisis but also to tackle long-term problems in our food system to bring prices down.

One policy that would have the greatest immediate impact is targeted income support. Higher food prices are felt most acutely by the poorest households, who spend a greater proportion of their income on essentials. Recent research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that five in six low-income households on Universal Credit struggle with food and bills. They propose an “Essentials Guarantee” – an uplift in benefits that would eradicate this issue.

Another option to combat food poverty is ramping up public provision of free and low-cost meals. This should include universal free school meals to help the 3.8 million children who currently live in food insecure households, but schools are not the only setting where meals could be publicly provided. An economic adviser to Burnham recently supported calls for a National Food Service, a network of community kitchens and diners providing free meals, and the Autonomy Institute has suggested that local authorities could repurpose “dark kitchens” (which cook for delivery platforms rather than a front-of-house restaurant) as community-owned kitchens cooking affordable food.

In the longer-term, the government needs to ensure our domestic food system is more resilient and produces more of what we consume. The UK currently imports around 40 per cent of its food, though this rises to around 50 per cent of vegetables and 80 per cent of fruit. These longer supply chains are more vulnerable to the effects of global shocks, with countries like Italy and Spain which produce more of their own food seeing lower price rises after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than the UK did.

Government support for local agriculture should focus on transitioning to more ecological and climate-resilient practices, including moving away from fossil-fuel based fertilisers. It should also seek to diversify the ownership of food production and retail. Rather than the rising number of environmentally destructive “megafarms”, we need more community and co-operative ownership of land, more grants for small-scale urban farming, as well as community-owned bakeries and food markets.

The four largest food and drink retailers in the UK (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Aldi) control two-thirds of the grocery market. While a Competition and Markets Authority investigation didn’t find evidence that this level of market power has led to excessive price rises for consumers, the imbalance of power between supermarkets and food producers can lead to supply chain unfairness that threatens the sustainability of UK agriculture.

Andy Burnham has signalled from his first days as Prime Minister that his economic strategy will involve finding ways to put money in people’s pockets now while also developing a long-term plan to transform the UK. His approach to the food system should be no different.

People need help to weather periods of crisis, but long-term trends are also putting upward pressure on prices that cannot be left unchecked. The government has trailed plans to help people afford their utility bills – now they need a bold plan to help people afford their food shop too.

Eleanor Shearer is a senior research fellow at Common Wealth think tank