Jim Shannon – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jim Shannon on 2016-07-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what her Department is doing to help reduce the price of food for people on low incomes.

George Eustice

It is not the Government’s role to set retail food prices. The main drivers of food prices are commodity prices, exchange rates and oil prices. Anything that affects these will have an impact on food prices.

Defra does monitor retail food prices through The Consumer Prices Index. Year on year food prices have continued to fall with an annual rate of inflation of minus 2.8 per cent in the year to May 2016. Following a period of higher food price inflation retail food prices have fallen by 7.0% since their peak in February 2014.

We also monitor trends in household expenditure on food through the Family Food Survey. This includes monitoring the percentage of household expenditure which is spent on food, including for households with the lowest 20% income, which was 15.4% for 2014 compared with an average of 16.1% over the last 10 years.