The Prime Minister has issued a warning to supermakets over rising grocery costs.
It comes after recent figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages continues to increase. Such grocery items have risen in price by 18.4 per cent - while this is down from 19.1 per cent in April it is still staggeringly high for customers.
Data from the ONS also shows that nearly half of adults (49 per cent) said they were buying less when shopping for food while 42 per cent of adults said they were spending less when shopping for food and essential itemes.
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Speaking in Kent, the Prime Minister told workers that their weekly shop "has gone up far too much in the past few months especially." He added: "We’re looking at the supermarkets, making sure that they’re behaving responsibly and fairly when it comes to pricing all those products, to make sure that we’re easing the burdens on your weekly shop.”
However, he added that delivering tax cuts would be difficult due to the current economic circumstances. He said: "I’ve got to make sure that the government is doing everything that it needs to do, and that means being responsible with our borrowing because we cannot, in a situation like this, borrow too much money because that makes everything worse. So that means that as much as I would like to, I’d love to cut your taxes tomorrow — you’d love that, I’d love that, of course I would — but that is hard to do because it means I would have to borrow more money to do it."
“Another thing is, I can’t say yes to every single thing people want me to spend more money on because that would mean we would have to borrow money to do all of that. That means I have to make some difficult choices, I have to prioritise like all of you do in your household budgets.
"I have to do the same thing too.”
