Ian Lavery
Main Page: Ian Lavery (Labour - Wansbeck)Department Debates - View all Ian Lavery's debates with the HM Treasury
Corporate Profit and Inflation
Ian Lavery Excerpts(12 months ago)
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Richard Burgon
That is absolutely right. It is scandalous when workers are not fairly paid, the public are being ripped off, and all this profiteering is causing the price crisis that we see. It is not for nothing that people call it greedflation.
On price caps, for all its obvious flaws in not being set low enough, the Government’s energy price guarantee, which was introduced last year, was an important break with the idea that the Government cannot interfere in market pricing to protect people. Surely such price caps should be extended to other sectors. It is very welcome that London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called for powers to allow him to impose private rent controls in London. Other countries do this, so why can we not do so here? On soaring food prices, the French Government have secured a deal with some of the country’s major retailers to place a price cap on staple foods to ease the pressure of inflation on consumers. Why not here?
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
Is it not absolutely perverse that in the fifth richest economy in the world we are seeing, on the one hand, supermarkets and retailers making billions and billions of pounds and, on the other, parents criminalising themselves by stealing baby formula because they cannot afford to feed their newborns? What on earth has gone wrong in this country?