Sainsbury’s boss is right to call for pragmatic immigration to stem food inflation
Food inflation has been high on the news agenda this week, with the Government seemingly ready to announce a fifth delay to implementing border checks on imported food to avoid further exacerbating the problem. But there’s something else the Government could do to ease the pressure on rising food prices. It could allow people into the country to fill gaps in the workforce that can’t be filled with UK workers.
While they’ve no control over input costs like commodity prices and energy, the UK Government now has an immigration system over which it can exercise full control. The Chief Executive of Sainsbury’s highlighted this issue earlier in the week. He pointed out that the UK food supply chain is full of these gaps in the workforce which is causing unusually high wage price inflation as too many companies are forced to compete for too few available workers. You can read Nick Allen’s take on how this is affecting the meat industry in our latest press release.
