UK should ‘cherish’ turnips, suggests Thérèse Coffey, as food shortages could last a month – business live

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Britain brought its shortages of fruit and vegetables upon itself, a former supermarket CEO has warned this morning.

Justin King, who ran Sainsbury’s for a decade, says the government’s failure to support the food industry with its soaring energy costs led to the restrictions on purchases of products such as tomatoes, pepper and cucumbers at major supermarkets.

King told Radio 4’s Today Programme that terrible weather in key sourcing locations [such as Spain and North Africa] have hit production, but to understand the problem we must “go further back”.

King points out:

This is a sector that’s been significantly disrupted by Brexit.

He also criticises the government for not providing energy support help to UK salad and vegetable growers.

Historically, salad veg has been grown 52 weeks of the year under glass in Britain, such as at Thanet Earth, the large agriculture and plant factory in Kent.

The government, though, chose not to support this sector from an energy point of view this winter.

This has had consequences, King says:

We are uniquely exposed to imports at this time of year.

There is a genuine shortage, but we did rather bring this problem on ourselves.

Yesterday, Tesco and Aldi joined Asda and Morrisons in rationing certain fresh produce lines.

Related: Tesco and Aldi join Asda and Morrisons in rationing salad ingredients

Q: But isn’t this down to global pressures on fuel, the cost of fertiliser, energy costs for heating costs, rather than brexit?

This is a sector that is “very integrated across Europe”, King points out.

The UK could have chosen to subsidise the energy costs for this sector this winter, as it did for other industries. King points out that the National Farmers Union warned months ago that this problem was evident.

In December, the NFU did indeed warn that UK fruit and veg growers werer under massive pressure due to soaring energy costs and workforce shortages. It said then that “a lack of fairness for farmers and growers throughout the supply chain” could lead to more empty shelves.

NFU president Minette Batters urged the government to take food security seriously this week, at their annual conference.

Also coming up today

The UK government is now preparing to help more than 300 energy-intensive companies to cope with the extremely high cost of power.

Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, is expected to announce new measures today to support employers in sectors most exposed to high energy costs, such as steel, metals, paper and chemicals.

Dubbed the British Industry Supercharger, it could cut the disparity in the price that UK heavy industry pays for electricity compared to European rivals.

My colleague Alex Lawson explains:

Ministers have moved to level the playing field on energy costs between British manufacturers and their European competitors after years of concerns that domestic firms faced an unfair disadvantage.

The “British Industry Supercharger” scheme aims to improve conditions for 300 companies – employing 400,000 workers – in sectors including steel, metals, chemicals and paper manufacturing.

Related: UK moves to cut industry energy bills to help compete with European rivals

Financial markets are digesting minutes of the US Federal Reserve’s latest meeting, released last night.

They show that the vast majority of policymakers backed its decision to slow the pace of US interest rate rises to 0.25 percentage points.

The agenda