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WALKED INTO THE LOCAL M&S garage shop last Sunday afternoon to pick up something for supper – two weeks in Newmarket for the Tattersalls October Yearling Sales meant my cupboards were bare. When I got into the shop the shelves resembled my kitchen. There was almost no fridge food or fresh produce available – no ready-made meals, no fruit or vegetables, no dairy products. It was starkly shocking to see an empty supermarket, and afforded a growing realisation that, should the logistics industry collapse as has been threatened over the past few weeks due to the lack of HGV drivers in Britain, this is what would be the result. Nations have fallen, riots ensued, and revolutions have been generated over food shortages in those countries that do not have the financial wellbeing to provide for its people. Britain is a long way from those concerns, but the
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“Simmons estimates that he had to leave vegetables worth upwards of £500,000 to rot in the fields
sight of empty shelves was a realisation as to just how quickly such issues do and could escalate. And, while a country such as Britain is a long way from those issues, is it really? Everyone demands cheap food, and food prices have not risen significantly for years. However, if the pay for an HGV driver needs to be rapidly increased in order to attract anyone to do the job – it has reported that the pay structure for a good driver is already radically different from this time last year – then there is only one way to cover increased wage costs, with an increase in the cost of the end product. If you add in growing agricultural labour costs – wages in the sector again already having to be increased for exactly the same reasons, some vegetable pickers are now on the equivalent of £30 an hour due to a lack of a local work force prepared to pick vegetables for the historic pay packet that was received for the job – then the price of food will surely
