Fed contributes to joint letter opposing Food Price Cap in Scotland

(The Fed’s Scottish President, Uthay Soundararajan, with last year’s President, Hussan Lal). 

The Fed’s Scottish President, Uthay Soundararajan, has joined a group of industry representatives, led by the Scottish Retail Consortium SRC,  in writing to the SNP First Minister, John Swinney MSP, in calling for price caps on essential goods to be scrapped.

Overall, 22 bodies signed the letter, including retail, food and drink production and manufacturing, and distribution, which together employ 300,000 people across Scotland. The letter stated: “We share your ambition to grow the economy, improve living standards, and keep down the cost of living for Scots.

We recognise there are differing views on how best to ease the cost of living, particularly for less affluent households. However, we jointly believe the mooted Statutory Food Price Cap is unnecessary, ineffective, and likely to deliver significant adverse consequences. Those impacts upon retailers, food and drink producers, and shopworkers in themselves are undesirable but the effect will be to increase, rather than decrease, the cost of household goods.”

The letter comments made by Mr Soundararajan on behalf of the Fed, earlier in the year, just before May’s election, in which the SNP ultimately emerged as the largest party. He said that: ““While this is not likely to affect our members directly, we are concerned this will distort trade and do nothing to help shops or their customers. Across the sector, retail is a very competitive market and small shops play an important part in it.

“The devil will be in the detail on this, but questions remain about how it will have an impact on different retailers – big and small, online and the high street, and those across the border in England – and it could cause unnecessary complexity and uncertainty”.