Sir John Hayes

I beg to move, That this House has considered the powers of the Groceries Code Adjudicator. It is a delight to be here and to speak on this subject, which is of great importance to my constituents, both consumers and producers. A free economy works best when those who buy and those who sell can do so in a multiplicity of places. Nowhere is that more important than in the field of food, for food is the most basic of all commodities; we all, after all, need to eat. That variety prevailed for most of time. Indeed, if one thinks of the earliest civilisations, the way we mark them is by their trading capacity, such as those in the Levant who traded food produced there in markets between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. Yet in my lifetime—in all our lifetimes—the provision of food in this country has changed. It was Napoleon who described Britain as a “nation of shopkeepers”. If only that were still true. In my boyhood, my mother could shop at a variety of places to obtain the food products and other household items that she needed. What has happened during my lifetime is that a monopoly supply, or near-monopoly supply, of food provision has emerged, in the form of the great behemoths, the huge supermarkets, the corporate interests that now dominate the provision of food. That has broken the food chain. Let us be in no doubt about where we are as a nation in respect of the provision and consumption of foodstuffs. The food chain is broken, and Governments of all colours have been reluctant to face that reality. Indeed, there has been a defence of the fact that most people now are obliged—I emphasise that: obliged—to buy their food from a handful of places, with little or no choice as to whether they do so, because, as I said, everyone has to buy and consume food. The defence offered is that it has driven prices down; but I will contest, in this short debate, that that is not really so. Bulk buying of food, which is now the norm—most people buy their food on a weekly basis; they fill their trolley with any number of goods—does three things. First, it disguises the relationship between cost and value. In the days when people bought as they needed, they had a pretty good idea of what things cost and whether they were providing value for money. When people fill a basket, those details are lost in bulk purchase. That allows supermarkets to produce what they call loss leaders, which are cheaper products that draw people in.