\n<\/p>\n
Food prices in the UK could climb even further if the chancellor raises taxes on supermarkets at the next budget, the industry has warned.<\/p>\n
Supermarket bosses, including those at Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury\u2019s and Morrisons, have said in a letter to Rachel Reeves that households would \u201cinevitably feel the impact\u201d of potential tax rises on the sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the industry faces higher taxes in the coming budget \u2013 such as being included in the new surtax on business rates \u2013 our ability to deliver value for our customers will become even more challenging, and it will be households who inevitably feel the impact,\u201d they wrote in the joint letter.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the costs currently falling on the industry, including from the last budget, high food inflation is likely to persist into 2026. This is not something that we would want to see prolonged by any measure in the budget.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pressure is mounting on the chancellor to increase taxes in the budget on 26 November to help to plug a shortfall in public finances.<\/p>\n
Supermarkets have complained that they were hit hard at the last budget, when Reeves announced a \u00a325bn increase in employer national insurance contributions and a 6.7% rise in the \u201cnational living wage\u201d. The changes came into effect this April.<\/p>\n
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said it was concerned that big shops could face much higher business rate tax bills if they are included in the government\u2019s new additional tax for properties with a rateable value of more than \u00a3500,000.<\/p>\n
Helen Dickinson, the chief executive of the BRC, said exempting supermarkets from this surtax would help keep food inflation under control.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe chancellor has rightly made tackling inflation her top priority, and with food inflation stubbornly high, ensuring retail\u2019s rates burden doesn\u2019t rise further would be one of the simplest ways to help,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis would not cost the taxpayer a penny, with large office blocks and industrial plants, for whom business rates is a smaller proportion of their costs, paying a little more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Official data shows that UK inflation was unchanged last month at 3.8%, with annual food price inflation easing from 5.1% in August to 4.5% in September. It was the first time this rate had slowed since March.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to Business Today<\/span><\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n However, the cumulative effect means grocery bills are much higher compared with a few years ago.<\/p>\n The letter, which was also signed by bosses at Aldi, Lidl, Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Iceland, says addressing \u201cretail\u2019s disproportionate tax burden would send a strong signal of support for the industry and of the government\u2019s commitment to tackling food inflation\u201d.<\/p>\n A Treasury spokesperson said: \u201cTackling food inflation is a priority, which is why we\u2019re boosting incomes through increasing the national living wage, lowering business rates for butchers, bakers and other shops, and sticking to our fiscal rules to bring inflation down.\u201d<\/p>\n It is understood the government takes the view that even if a property\u2019s rateable value increases, the way the system works means that its bill could still go down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Food prices in the UK could climb even further if the chancellor raises taxes on supermarkets at the next budget, the industry has warned. Supermarket bosses, including those at Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury\u2019s and Morrisons, have said in a letter to Rachel Reeves that households would \u201cinevitably feel the impact\u201d of potential tax rises on the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1725,495,269,1092,2656,345,12111,101],"class_list":{"0":"post-30706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-food","9":"tag-higher","10":"tag-prices","11":"tag-push","12":"tag-reeves","13":"tag-rises","14":"tag-supermarkets","15":"tag-tax"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}