It infuriates me that Brexit-related food price rises can be described as a mere ‘bump in the road’

Just how much of a “bump in the road” might a five per cent no-deal-Brexit-related rise in food prices, warned of by Tesco chairman John Allan, be?  

I know people are wary when it comes to trusting big companies, and they should be. But Allan operates in an environment where financial statements are required to be accurate by law and there is a risk of badly damaging your business if that is not the case.

Government ministers, who attempted to brush off Allan’s concerns, have a less than stellar reputation when it comes to the truth. So I’m inclined to take him at his word.

Earlier this week, researcher Kantar found that the average UK family had spent £4,206 on groceries over the year to date. Projecting that to the end of the year gets you to £4,600.

This year’s number has been boosted by people eating out less, for obvious reasons, but you also have to remember that I’m not allowing for Christmas, when people traditionally spend a lot more at the supermarkets, with that projection.

If you add 5 per cent to it, then next year’s number comes out at £230 extra, just under £20 a month, which is chump change to a millionaire cabinet minister but potentially very painful to someone on a low income.

If your food budget rises by £20 a month and you’re on universal credit that’s a quarter of the government’s emergency Covid-19 uplift, which is due to disappear in April anyway.

Now, I realise that a five per cent increase in grocery bills won’t amount to £20 for a low-income family because they’ll likely be spending a lot less than £4,600 a year on grocery.

To get the true figure, I’d have to apply the percentage to a lower base. But whatever a low-income family’s current bill is, a sudden increase of five per cent is still going to bite them, and potentially bite hard.

Citizens Advice says three in every four of the people in receipt of universal credit and working tax credit that it helps with debt will have a negative budget – which means their outgoings exceed what they have coming in – when that £20 uplift is taken away. That’s because £20 is the average amount they currently have left after covering their living costs but, crucially, before any debt repayments.

The charity’s research suggests that six million UK adults have missed at least one payment through the course of the pandemic.

Throw in an extra fiver a week on groceries, or even, say, an extra three quid a week on groceries, and you start to realise we aren’t talking here about a “bump in the road”. It’s a head-on car crash at high speed that could tip hundreds of thousands more people into negative budget territory.

It doesn’t matter how much you currently spend, if your underlying budget is on a knife-edge you are unlikely to be about to weather this sort of storm.

Some more data from Citizens Advice: it says that negative budgets aren’t just a problem for people who are out of work. They also bite people who are in it. For example, some 58 per cent of the self-employed people it helps with debt are on a negative budget compared with 40 per cent last year.

Self-employed people, those with the get-up-and-go Tory MPs profess to love, the daily gumption to get on their bikes to look for work (although, let’s be honest, it’s actually more likely to be their phones and their email accounts these days) have suffered particularly badly through the course of the pandemic.

The schemes set up to help them get through it are among the weakest of the package of economic support put together by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. They have deep holes.

All this explains why it infuriates me when ministers blithely use phrases like “bumps in the road” to dismiss the real world impact of their policies.

This might be because, unlike them, I spent part of my childhood living in social housing, eating free school meals and wearing my brother’s hand-me-down clothes (he was bigger than me long before his adolescent growth spurt sent him spiralling up towards six feet).

What would a sudden spike in food prices have done to us in those days? The very thought makes me shudder. It would make anyone with a grain of compassion and/or concern for their fellow Britons shudder.