Healey warned ‘the dam is breaking’ on shop price inflation

The Chancellor has been warned that the “dam is starting to break” on surging shop price inflation, which retailers had kept at bay with heavy discounting. Shop prices rose by 2.1 per cent in the year to October, according to new data from the British Retail Consortium, ahead of September’s 1.4 per cent and the three-month average of 1.6 per cent. Retailers have said the long-feared spike in inflation caused by the Iran war’s knock-on effects on energy and supply costs is beginning to take hold. Rising prices of long-life goods are behind this uplift. Fresh food inflation remained steady at 2.6 per cent, while overall food prices rose 2.9 per cent in the year to October, up from 2.5 per cent the previous month. Price inflation among non-food goods almost doubled, from 0.8 per cent in September to 1.7 per cent in the year to this month. Shortly following the US and Israel’s first strikes on Iran, food industry experts warned that the effective closure of the Strait of