Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department will make an assessment of the impact of the increase in cost of food on (a) low income households, (b) students, (c) ethnic minorities and (d) those people earning the national average wage in the UK.

We recognise the impact of rising food prices, which are occurring as a result of global shocks, including the spike in oil and gas prices and the conflict in Ukraine. We are keeping the market situation under review through the UK Agriculture Market Monitoring Group, which monitors all key agricultural commodities.

DEFRA has also increased our engagement with industry to supplement our analysis with real time intelligence. Defra will continue to work with food retailers and producers to explore the range of measures they can take to ensure the availability of affordable food. For example, by maintaining value ranges, price matching and price freezing measures.

Annual food price inflation, reported by ONS, was estimated at 16.8% in January 2023, which represented a very slight fall of 0.1 percentage points on the December 2022 rate and the first fall recorded in 18 months. Although this very small decline in food price inflation was reported for January 2023, more data will be needed before we can know if this is the start of a sustained fall.

Defra analysis, based on ONS data, shows that every one percent increase in food price inflation increases the average annual United Kingdom household food bill by £34. Defra analysis, based on the 2020 1ONS Family Spending survey, highlights that 11% of the total expenditure of the average United Kingdom household is on food. This varies from 14% for lowest income households to 8% for highest income households.