10 The Sunday Times May 29, 2022
NEWS
The modern Sunday roast is a triumph of
the international food market. You might
have a British chicken roasted in butter
from Denmark, and served with parsnips
from Spain, potatoes from Ireland and
carrots from France.
“The UK has been a phenomenal global
success story when it comes to affordable
food,” Minette Batters, president of the
National Farmers’ Union, says.
But our global plates hold us hostage to
global forces. Worldwide food prices,
according to the UN, are 30 per cent
higher than they were a year ago.
We have been tracking prices at Sains-
bury’s and Tesco since the start of Febru-
ary. The cost of 14 ingredients for a typical
Sunday roast has jumped from £22.10 to
£24.27 — a jump of nearly 10 per cent in
just four months.
Few of our roast dinner staples come
directly from Russia or Ukraine. But the
knock-on effect of the war, combined
with a climate crisis, labour shortages
and poor harvests, is affecting what we
pay for food in unexpected ways.CHICKEN
Before intensive farming, chicken was
the preserve of the upper classes. Now it
is one of the cheapest meats. But this
month Steve Murrells, the chief executive
of Co-op, warned that chicken could
become as expensive as beef once again.
The centrepiece in our fantasy roast, a
free range whole chicken, has jumped in
price from an average of £8.90 across the
two supermarkets, to £9.96 — a rise of 11.
per cent in four months. Cheaper birds
are available, but none is immune to
inflation. Most of our chickens are
farmed in Britain yet chicken farmers are
looking at double-digit inflation when it
comes to the costs of production.Tom Calver Data Projects Editor BUTTER AND THE REST
Our chosen tub of Lurpak slightly salted
butter is up 8.1 per cent, meaning 50g of it
costs 47 pence. It is imported from Den-
mark, meaning rising transport costs.
Butter is getting more expensive to pro-
duce thanks to fertiliser, feed and fuel.
The remaining ingredients are influ-
enced by many of the factors listed
above. Bisto gravy granules, which con-
tain wheat flour, are up about 11 per cent,
while Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire puddings
are up 7 percent.
Cauliflower, which has fluctuated in
price due to difficult growing conditions,
is 10.8 per cent more expensive than at
the start of February. Carrots, garlic and
parsnips remain unchanged for now.ALTERNATIVES
While chicken and pork have soared,
lamb and beef have seen more modest
price rises. Those looking for cheaper
meat-free alternatives, however, may be
disappointed.
“Vegetable-based meat substitutes...
take an enormous amount of energy and
ingredients,” Dave Marcotte of Kantar, a
retail data company, says. “You need oil
and grains, both of which are in short
supply. Going vegetarian isn’t a bad way
to go, but at the moment, if the whole
country went meat-free, we wouldn’t
have the infrastructure to support it.”
Growing local to avoid transport costs
is tempting but hard to do at scale.
Besides, Britain does not have the climate
for many of the crops we consume.
“Countries grow what they’re really
good at growing, and generally don’t
grow what they can get from somewhere
else,” Marcotte adds. The cost of our roast
dinner remains bound up in events
happening thousands of miles away.
@TomHCalvercould not be processed due to staff short-
ages at abattoirs, exacerbated by Brexit.
Then the cost of feed soared. Farmers, on
their sixth consecutive quarter of losses,
are losing about £60 a pig.
Since February, the price of eight back
bacon rashers has risen from £2 to £2.25,
a rise of 12.5 per cent. The cost of six pork
sausages has also gone from £2.30 to
£2.75, an increase of 19.6 per cent, the
most of any product in the roast basket.
This is bad news if you enjoy pigs-in-blan-
kets outside of the Christmas season.
“If this situation continues without
government support, there won’t be any
British pigs,” Davis says.OLIVE OIL
While sunflower oil prices have soared,
olive oil — most people’s oil of choice for a
roast — has stayed stable at about 31
pence for the 50ml in our recipe.U2.2%
Feb 4 - May 26Why you’ll need to be on the gravy
train to afford a proper Sunday roast
mercifully, increased by just 2.2 per cent
since February. But with 67 per cent of
Britain’s potatoes imported from EU coun-
tries such as Ireland, prices may be pushed
up further by the recent difficulties of mov-
ing goods to and from the trading bloc.
Petrol, at 171p per litre, and diesel, at
182p, are both up by more than a third on
this time last year, raising the cost of
transportation. There has also been a
Europe-wide shortage of lorry drivers.PIGS IN BLANKETS
Until recently, sausage and bacon prices
were relatively stable. “Pork is treated as
a loss leader in supermarkets,” Zoe Davis,
chief executive of the National Pig Associ-
ation, says. “They resist putting the cost
up because they’re worried they’ll lose
footfall.” But Britain’s pig farms are strug-
gling. Just before Russia invaded Ukraine,
they had a backlog of 100,000 pigs thatU16.3%
Feb 4 - May 26Poor harvests and the war in Ukraine have seen the cost of ingredients jump by a tenth. Here we carve up the worrying statistics
U11.9%
Feb 4 - May 26U0%
Feb 4 - May 26U6.7%
Feb 4 - May 26Much of that is down to chicken feed,
whose ingredients include soya, sun-
flower oil and wheat. Russia and Ukraine,
the “breadbasket of Europe”, export
about a third of the world’s wheat. Britain
is relatively self-sufficient, producing 80
per cent of its wheat. Even so, the whole-
sale price has rocketed.
Ukraine and Russia produce about 60
per cent of the world’s sunflower oil,
another feed ingredient: shoppers may
have seen notices in supermarkets urging
them to buy substitutes. Much of
Ukraine’s production of sunflower seeds
is in the east, where intense fighting is tak-
ing place. Other farming costs are soaring:
operating farming machinery is becoming
more expensive thanks to high oil prices.BROCCOLI
We all need to eat our greens, and the
price of broccoli grown in the south ofEngland has risen from 90p to 96p since
the start of February, a modest rise of 6.
per cent. It may soon go up further.
Russia is one of the main exporters of
nitrogen, and nitrogen fertiliser is three
times as expensive as it was a year ago.
Labour represents about 70 per cent of
total production costs. Julian Marks is
managing director of Barfoots, one of the
country’s biggest farmers of asparagus,
courgettes and tenderstem broccoli. “We
had hundreds of Ukrainian farmers
under the visa workers pilot programme.
Nearly all of them wanted to come back.
Now, though, they’re still fighting in
Ukraine,” he says. “There are growers so
short of labour they’re destroying crops
because they can’t harvest them.”POTATO ES
Surely it wouldn’t be a proper roast with-
out roasties. The cost of maris pipers has,U8.1%
Feb 4 - May 26Scafell PikeWindermereChapel StileAAmbleside5 milesMany of us would wince at
the £700-a-night price tag for
a two-bedroom self-catered
villa in July, even for a five-
star family resort which
overlooks Portugal’s crystal
clear waters.
But that was the price if
you booked it four months
ago. If you left it later and
booked last week, the same
terraced villa at the Martinhal
Sagres resort for the same
dates would cost £1,000 a
night, excluding flights, meals
and transfers.
The cost of holidays both at
home and abroad is soaring
due to a combination of rising
global energy costs, high
demand, and a need to make
up for lost trade during the
Covid pandemic.
Travel experts say
“vacation inflation”,Louise Eccles and
Venetia Menziesparticularly the cost of self-
catered accommodation, was
now reaching a point where
some households will be
forced to put plans on hold
for a third consecutive
summer.
The comparison website
TravelSupermarket said a
seven-night stay abroad,
including flights and a three
to five-star hotel, is around 19
per cent more expensive for
September 2022 than
September 2019, if both were
booked in May. The increase
was higher for popular
seaside destinations
including Turkey at 24 per
cent and Portugal at 30 per
cent.
There is still some hope for
a getaway. Chris Webber,
head of holidays and deals at
TravelSupermarket, said:
“There are some destinations
still offering great prices to
travel this summer. Theaverage cost of a seven-night
holiday in Bulgaria is still
coming in at under £450 per
person, while a week in
Morocco is £592 per person
on average.”
But the cost of car hire in
many European destinations
is rising so fast that
holidaymakers are being
advised to check they can
afford it before booking their
flights and accommodation,
as rental companies suffer
from the worldwide shortage
of new cars.
There is also bad news for
people who assume that
staying in the UK might cut
their costs: AirDNA, which
monitors accommodation on
Airbnb and Vrbo, said
average prices in the UK had
risen by 20 per cent since
2019, more than Italy at 18 per
cent, Spain at 15 per cent and
France at 13 per cent.
Rory Boland, travel editorat Which?, said:
“Accommodation prices have
gone up across Europe, but
especially so in the UK, and
particularly for private
holiday rentals. Even when
you take into account flights,
it is often still cheaper to go
abroad. This is because
demand for self-catered
accommodation that we saw
during lockdown remains
extraordinarily high.”
Matt Fox, chief executive of
the Snaptrip Group, which
owns LateRooms.com and
Last Minute Cottages, said he
believed prices had reached a
peak and there would need to
now be “a big shift in pricing
to avoid having a lot of empty
UK holiday rental properties
this summer”.
Flights, at least, remain
below pre-pandemic levels
and some destinations such
as Rome, Paris and
Marrakesh are still betweenIf you’re after a cheap summer break, vacation
inflation means it might have to be Bulgaria
Many young
people are priced
out of the village
of Chapel StileVillage where 85% of the
houses are second homes,
and they all get a fuel grant
46 per cent and 48 per cent
cheaper than in May 2019,
according to Skyscanner, the
flight-comparison website.
Price rises for car hire,
however, are not so easily
solved. According to
iCarhireinsurance.com, the
average cost of car rental in
Barcelona for the first week of
August is now £609, more
than double the £258 price in- Many rental fleets were
sold off during the pandemic
as demand dried up.
Travel experts also said
people should explore
quieter coastlines to save up
to £200 a night on
accommodation. Research by
Which? showed that a hotel
room in St Ives, Cornwall, is
£301 a night, and £265 in
Salcombe, Devon, compared
with £127 in Bamburgh,
Northumberland, and £91 in
Worthing, West Sussex.
@Louise_Eccles
Holiday accommodation prices in popular UK resorts — such as Weymouth in Dorset — have risen 20 per cent since 2019, more than France and SpainGRAHAM HUNT/BNPS
limit the washing machine to
a couple of washes a week.”
Chapel Stile is just a few
miles northwest of the tourist
honeypot of Ambleside, with
its cafés, pleasure boats, and
watersports. It is an enviable
place to call home but locals
pay a premium to live in the
Lake District.
Housing costs are high
here and incomes are low,
with many working in the
tourism and hospitality
sectors. Public transport is
expensive and unreliable,
leaving many households no
choice but to run a car. Even
local shops charge higher
prices for a loaf of bread than
city convenience stores.
Asked why the money is
being given to second
homeowners, the Treasury
insisted that it would be
impossible to differentiate
between which energy bills
are paid by those with more
than one home.
The average median full-
time salary for somebody
living in Farron’s
constituency, Westmorland &
Lonsdale, is £20,400 a year,
below the average of £23,
in the North West of England,
according to ONS data for
2019-20. Farron said: “The
thing to remember about an
area like ours is we’ve got
very low unemployment, but
low incomes. And on top of
that, the cost of living in a
rural community is that much
greater.”
However, Jeremy Lewis, 57,
who runs the local shop in
Chapel Stile, puts it bluntly. “I
basically earn my living from
the tourists,” he said. “So I
don’t want anything to stop
them coming.”
@HannahAlOthmanvillage sold for more than
£1 million, far beyond the
reach of those who have lived
here all their lives, often in
rented accommodation.
“It’s absolutely disgusting,”
Sue Monk, 71, said. “They
have pots of money to start
with. They do local people
out of being able to own a
home because we can’t afford
them. We’re all in rented
accommodation. Why they
should get it for their second
homes, I have no idea.”
Monk, who lives alone, is
keeping her head above
water but only because she
manages her money
carefully. “I’m on the basic
state pension — I’ve nothing
else,” she said. “I don’t put
the television on till
five o’clock at night, and I
usually switch it off at about
eight. I switch lights off, IIt is easy to see why second
homeowners love Chapel
Stile, a beautiful village close
to both Windermere and
England’s highest peak,
Scafell Pike.
About 85 per cent of the
160 or so homes in the village
are holiday lets or second
homes, according to the local
MP, the former Liberal
Democrat leader Tim Farron.
For people who actually
live in the village — an
increasingly rare breed — the
takeover by outsiders is
worrying. Many are angry
that second homeowners will
get the same £400 discount
on their energy bill this year,
announced last week by the
chancellor, as they will.
“That extra £400 benefit
for people who do not need it
is to completely fail to read
the room, to fail to
understand one of the biggest
things affecting rural
communities,” Farron said.
Many of the few remaining
full-time residents of Chapel
Stile are pensioners —
younger people have mostly
gone elsewhere, in search of
better job opportunities and
more affordable housing. On
the Rightmove website,
properties being advertised
for sale around the village
include a £725,000 three-
bedroom end-of-terrace
house in Elterwater, near
Ambleside.
“It’s terrible,” said Gordon
Smith, 87, who has lived in
Chapel Stile his entire life.
“There’ll be no local people
left. In fact, we’re being
driven out.”
Last year a four-bedroom
semi-detached house in theHannah Al-Othman£20,
Average salary in
Westmorland and Lonsdale£725,
Price of a three-bedroom
house in Elterwater£
Energy discount for every
home in Britain this year