Their incompetence has pushed up prices

From P Hedditch.

ON the front page of your paper (JEP, 20 May) you ask ‘Why is our food so expensive?’

You’ve already been given part of the answer by a Waitrose spokesman quoted (JEP, 4 March). By sourcing their Hovis 400g loaf from a UK baker they can sell it at 60p here, by sourcing from our Jersey monopoly baker their price is £1.39 – a huge 132% hike.

The cost of flour in Jersey cannot be much more than in the UK, nor can the cost of fuel to fire the ovens, but of course the labour costs are obscenely higher and the local baker has no competition to keep a lid on his charges.

Our high cost base here is a direct result of slack incompetent management of the Island economy over the last 40 years. Early in the 1970s Jersey was a good value place, compared with the UK. Now it is a high cost base. In those days we had money ‘coming out of our ears’ but what have we got to show for it now? Our infrastructure was in good shape then and our road surfaces among the best. Today our road surfaces smack of the ‘banana republic’, in keeping with Tourism’s banana logo.

My wife and I have just returned from a self-catering holiday along the south-west coast of England. Not one of the cheaper areas, yet food shopping there is a joy, reflecting their intense competition. We note below some of the UK prices we paid (Jersey equivalent price in brackets) in our routine basic shopping during the last week of our holiday (we were not hunting for best value):

Skimmed milk at Tesco, per litre, 44p (at Waitrose Jersey £1.22); Nestlé Shredded Wheat Bitesize 500g, at Tesco 99p (£2.61); Hovis Original Wheatgerm 400g loaf, at Waitrose Dorchester 60p (£1.42); little gem lettuce (twin pack), 50p (£1.42); navel oranges, large and juicy ,14p each (70p) ; smoked salmon, 200g, £2.79 (£8.40); Emmental cheese, 400g, £1.99 (£4.80); Non-food items: 42 Finish ‘All-in-One’ Powerball dishwasher tablets, £5.10 (£10.26).

Senator Alan Maclean tells you he ‘wants the JCRA to review the situation’ and establish why and to what extent our food is so much more costly.

If this is done, you can be sure the JCRA will not come up with the huge price differences detailed above. Their report will put the brightest slant on it they possibly can, along the lines of ‘yes, our prices are higher but not by much’. It will be the usual ‘whitewash’ spin from an evasive profligate government that knows there is no accountability for its gross mismanagement.

Go shopping in the UK and see if you believe that our annual inflation rate is truly only 3.1%, against theirs of 5.3%.

An RPI can be compiled to produce any figure, from, say, minus 5% to plus 10% and above.