I move:
That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to establish a Grocery Price Caps Commission to set maximum prices for basic foodstuffs and to provide for related matters.
I am very happy to introduce the Grocery Price Caps Bill and thank all those who have worked on it. We in People Before Profit are introducing the Bill because food costs are a massive issue for hundreds of thousands of families across the country. An annual survey of food poverty carried out by Barnardos shows that food poverty is getting worse and worse. More than one in four parents said they did not have enough food to feed their children at some point in the past year. This is up from one in five in 2022. One in eight parents had used a food bank, which is up from one in 20 in 2022. Almost half said they are always or sometimes worried about whether they will have enough food for their family, which is up from one in five in 2022.
When these figures came out, the then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, cast doubt upon them and said he could not really believe them. I am sure that many people in a segment of society who are not affected by this think there is no way this could be the case because those figures are absolutely shocking. The figures are true, however. They got worse year on year and they are happening in one of the richest countries in the world. It is an absolute disgrace.
One of the main reasons that food poverty has grown so much is a huge escalation in the cost of food. Food prices have risen by 20% in the past three years and, for all of the headlines about inflation going down, that does not mean that prices are coming down; it just means they are not rising as quickly as they were previously. Prices are still going up. In some cases the prices of staple goods that Irish families rely on to feed their children are still rising rapidly. The latest CSO statistics show that the price of potatoes increased by 17% in the past year, while rice and frozen vegetables rose by close to 11%. This comes on top of earlier double-digit increases in the price of milk, eggs, butter, pasta and white sliced pan. The child poverty monitor 2024, published by the Children's Rights Alliance on Monday, points out that food costs for a child between the ages of zero and two increased by nearly 9% over a six-month period in 2023. It now costs between €780 and €910 for baby formula for a year.
What is the Government doing about this? It is doing precisely nothing. This time last year, if the Members can cast their mind back, the then junior Minister for enterprise, Deputy Richmond, promised he was going to get tough with the supermarket bosses. He said that profit margins in the sector were way above normal and that there was a big difference between profit and profiteering. We know from an analysis of Central Bank data by economist Michael Taft that profit margins accounted for more than 60% of all price increases between 2020 and 2022. We also know the Musgrave Group, which owns SuperValu and Centra, made €116 million of profits in 2022, an increase of €6 million on 2021.
Ken Murphy, the chief executive officer of Tesco, doubled his pay packet last year to £10 million. Tesco reported an 11% rise in its annual profits.
This time last year, the Government was going to tell the supermarket bosses to cut grocery prices or the it would use consumer protection law to impose caps on those caps. One year later, grocery prices and supermarket profits are still going up but the Government has done absolutely nothing to address the matter. That is why I am introducing this Bill, which proposes the setting up of a grocery prices cap commission made up of consumer and employee representatives, and particularly low-paid workers and vulnerable groups. It would decide which basic foodstuffs should be subject to price caps and what those caps should be, taking into account the importance of different foods in average diets, the increases in the costs of different foods over the past three years and the profits relating to foodstuffs and the grocery and food production sectors in general.
Ensuring that people can afford to put food on the table and that children do not go to bed hungry is the absolute bare minimum that one should expect of the Government of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. This Government is failing to meet even that basic minimum standard. It is time to evict Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party and the right-wing Independents who prop them up and elect a left Government for the first time in the history of the State to implement measures precisely like those I have outlined.
