Speaking at a meeting of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, Ian Wright, chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), said that rising costs across the food supply chain must be addressed.

Wright told the room that the committee now needs “to think seriously about inflation.” He continued: “In hospitality, a precursor to retail, inflation is running somewhere between 14 and 18%. That is terrifying.

“A significant amount of inflation is already coming into the [supply chain] system. Commodity prices are going up. Gas prices […] are the highest they’ve ever been. Wage inflation is very significant across the supply chain, because of the shortage of workers.”

When asked by Alan Brown MP about the effect of the rises in wages in the HGV sector on inflation across the wider supply chain, Wright explained while it is good news for employees gaining rises in pay, it has a knock-on effect on the rest of the supply chain.

He went onto say that inflation is “a bigger scourge than anything else because it discriminates against the poor.”