§ Mr. Arthur Lewisasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether he will publish in the Official Report the text of his letter of 14th July 1978 to the hon. Member for Newham, North-West dealing with the question of food prices and wrong information as published in some of the press.
§ Mr. StrangYes, The text of my letter to the hon. Member is as follows
Thank you for your note of 29 June asking for comments on this article from the Daily Mail'.(1) I think I can best reply by sending you this copy of the press release(2) on which the article was based. You will see from this that the 'Daily Mail', together with some others who also implied that food prices are rising faster than the published figures for inflation generally, were guilty of a serious misunderstanding of our National Food Survey results for the first quarter of 1978.As is our custom, the main comparisons were made with the same period a year ago so as to avoid seasonal variations. On this basis, it is perfectly true that average household spending on food was just over 10 per cent. higher than the year before. In the same period, as our press release made clear, food prices rose on average by only a little over 6 per cent.—that is, much less than the general rate of inflation. This meant that, in real terms, housewives indeed spent about 3.7 per cent. more on household food purchases than in the same period of 1977. But the explanation for this is simple. The average household bought more food.The exact amount of the extra purchases cannot be quantified because the balance of goods changed and the prices of different foods advanced by different amounts. But households spent more primarily because they bought greater quantities of beef, meat products, fish, and some processed fruit, and the same quantities of bread, all of which commodities had increased in price by at least as much as the increase in the general level of food prices over the year; also, although they bought rather less milk, cheese, apples, flour, some types of flour confectionery, tea and coffee, their expenditure on these items was greater because of increased prices. These increases in expenditure were partially (but not completely) offset by savings on butter (where consumer bought greater quantities at the lower prices brought about by the EEC subsidy) and on potatoes and other fresh vegetables where considerably more was bought at lower prices because of the improved supply situation).Incidentally, you may care to note that the newspaper article was completely wrong in stating that the volume of purchases of beef, pork and fish fell.(1) 26 June 1978.
418W(2) Food Facts No. 6, published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fiseries and Food on 26 June 1978, copies of which are available in the Library of the House.