Would take a hefty bump from what? You bring up a good point and I think it's worthwhile to look at this further. Weaker sterling has increased food prices by 0.2% thus far, which isn't all that noticeable, owing to how fiercely all our retailers compete with one another to keep prices down. Looking into this further Beeb suggests that the hundreds of thousands using food banks would not disappear with favourable fluctuations in the economy, largely owing to the long term trend of incomes for most people stagnating or declining while living costs increase:
Since 2007, the cost of food has gone up by 8% in real terms. Research conducted by Cambridge University shows that the price of healthy foods has gone up more in the last 10 years than unhealthy foods. Public Health England acknowledges that the price of food is an important part of
why people eat as they do. In contrast, incomes have stagnated or even declined in value. The Government’s data show that disposable income for the poorest 20% of UK households has gone down every year since 2004. The 2013 Living Costs and Food Survey showed that the poorest 10% of households only spent an average of £46 on food and non-alcoholic drinks each week but that accounted for 15% of their household expenditure. In contrast, the richest 10% spent more than £80 but this amounted to less than 7% of their expenditure.
From the food foundation
Also from the report is that we don't really know why this is happening for millions because the gov isn't collecting data and seems to be avoiding collecting any data in order to justify inaction
Also while the overall price for foods is not terribly noticeable, certain food produces that are not produced anywhere else in the world but European nations will no doubt increase in price, probably regardless of deals struck, since customs is customs and customs cost. French wine, cheese, Spanish tomatoes, pork and other stuff like Dutch beers. How much will they increase? I dunno
Tariffs, customs and so on. Anything originating from or shipped through the EU would become more expensive.
25% of UK food consumed comes from the EU, and unless we get a trade deal, which is unlikely given the way the EU handles trade with other nations, basically being a 'Norway deal or our flat rate for non-members' situation, we'd fall back on WTO rules. Now, since the UK and EU are members of the WTO, they have to give each other a special rate on import/export duty. It's apparently an average of 2% on non-agricultural products, and an average of 22% on agricultural ones. There is a lot of range in that though, with wine being just 14% and beef 59%. (Figures taken from
https://www.ft.com/content/7f0c732c-93b8-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b?mhq5j=e2)
Obviously the exact rate will depend on the exact proportions of stuff we import, but we import mostly fruit/veg (£8.7 billion in 2014) and meat (£6 billion 2014), followed by beverages (£5.2 billion 2014). (
https://www.theatlas.com/charts/S1vGKAcS)
Tariffs also hit in the opposite direction of course and will hurt food exports, 40% of which we normally sell to the EU. Lot of farmers and brewers will be hit hard by that as their normal export market looks elsewhere for suppliers.
This isn't going to cause some kind of price explosion, except maybe in regards to meat like beef and lamb. But it's going to cause an increase of food prices across the board, and that's the last thing people already struggling to pay their rent, their car insurance, their TV license and so on need. It'll be mostly irrelevant to anyone who's paid well and has a good house with a low rate mortgage, beyond giving them a reason to bitch about the price of steak, but they're not the people who need worried about, it's the single mothers on zero hours contracts, the people struggling to keep the heating on and feed their kids, the elderly living on state pensions and so on who'll suffer. There's tons of people struggling to stay above the poverty line, and for some of them it will only take a small rise in the cost of essentials to sink under it.
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