UK Economy

Debate between Matt Rodda and Bim Afolami

Monday 19th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Bim Afolami]

As I have said many times this afternoon, inflation is a target for this Government: we aim to ensure that we continue to bring it down, and indeed we expect it to get to 2% in the coming months. In relation to food inflation specifically, at the last fiscal event we introduced full expensing, which will enable food manufacturers, supermarkets and others to increase their investment hugely, because it completely nets off against their tax—100% of the cost of their investment is netted off. The impact will be increased investment that will reduce their costs and reduce the cost of food in our shops. That is one of many measures that we are introducing to reduce food inflation.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister said he was going to grow the economy and he has obviously failed: we are now in recession. In my constituency, families and small businesses are under severe pressure. Can the Minister possibly explain how he is going to address these very serious problems?

[Bim Afolami]

All I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that we are in a very challenging international context and we have performed better than the international forecasts. We had high inflation, which really bedevilled this economy a couple of years ago, but we have more than halved it. We have a plan to grow our way out of this, as was shown by the last fiscal event, where we unveiled, I think, 110 growth measures. That is our plan. The Labour Opposition do not have a plan. If this country sticks with our plan, we will grow our economy significantly over the coming months and years.