IEA Communications Officer Harrison Griffiths has written in CapX criticising reports that the government will ask supermarkets to cap the price of essential food items.

Harrison wrote:

“As for food prices, we have ample evidence of what will happen if you try to artificially suppress prices. As my colleague Julian Jessop pointed out last week, price caps on some items must be mitigated, either through supermarkets cutting inventory or raising prices on uncapped goods. Worse still, if the existing dynamic price system is replaced with a cap, supermarkets are incentivised to price their foods as close to that cap as possible, which may keep prices artificially high when they may have otherwise started to fall.”

Read the full piece here.