Christian Jaccarini

UK food prices are on track to be 50 per cent higher by November than they were when the cost-of-living crisis began five years ago, according to new research from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank. Volatile oil and gas prices, synthetic fertiliser costs, and extreme weather pushed food bills up by an average of £605 over 2022 and 2023, with energy shocks accounting for £244 of the rise.

BBC piece: bbc.co.uk/news/articles/… Coverage: dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar… ft.com/content/ced837…

[5] So yes, tax and labour policy play a role, but climate change is the big picture. 🌍 The only real way to limit future food price shocks is to cut emissions, reach #NetZero, and bring stability back to our climate.

[1]⁉️ Why are food prices still rising? Food prices have surged for years and food was up to 5.1% in August. What stands out to me is how much coverage (including the BBC’s) echoes the food industry’s line: blaming higher minimum wages, employer NICs and packaging taxes.

Morning! From 5am: 👮‍♀️ Police no longer investigating non-crime hate 👑 MP’s call for Andrew to lose title of Prince 🍫 Coffee, chocolate, beef and dairy driving food inflation @CJaccarini 🇮🇱 Maccabi Tel Aviv decline ticket allocation 🍕 Pizza Hut @realVickyPryce 📰 @BeccaHutson

Tax policy may make headlines, but it's climate breakdown that’s reshaping the economics of food. Price spikes in salad leaves, coffee, and olive oil have been driven by water scarcity and extreme weather. What once looked isolated is now hardening into permanent volatility. 1/3

"Too many renters are stuck in damp, dangerous, and insecure homes, while rogue landlords go unchallenged and enforcement teams are stretched to breaking point," says Christian Jaccarini. Read the full report here: neweconomics.org/2025/07/detail… 6/6

NEW RESEARCH: Private renters are facing a postcode lottery when reporting substandard housing conditions to local authorities due to a lack of enforcement officers. With @NationwideFdtn 1/6

The Renters' Rights Bill is expected to kick in early next year - but how will abolishing Section 21 even be enforced? Me @abioconnor_+@CJaccarini looked into how the PRS database must be used to strengthen tenants' rights and ensure council capacity is optimised. Read below👇

Tariffs are cost shocks. Last time around, across the board cost shocks coordinated price hikes and triggered sellers' inflation (see paper below). Get ready for the next inflation bout! This time courtesy of MAGA.

This government says they're cutting benefits to encourage people to work. But the DWP & OBR between them haven't yet been able to forecast any impact on employment outcomes. They're causing huge hardship without any analysis of whether it will even help meet their goals.

The OBR has not yet been able to forecast any employment gain from the cuts/changes to incapacity & disability benefits MPs are being asked to support around £6.5bn of cuts & increased conditionality for ill & disabled people without any clear assessment of what it will achieve

'Unless the Government can find the money to either subsidise inflated food prices or else put more money in people’s pockets, they’ll struggle to sell Net Zero... Rural America has already fled into the arms of the populists — and rural Britain may not be far behind.'

'When we destroyed the old system based on thousands of small farms and allowed a handful of corporations to manage whole sectors of farming, as we’ve done in the egg industry, we laid ourselves open to exploitation, to anti-competitive cartels and monopolies'

'We... produce[d] the cheapest eggs in history, through giant industrial farms, but in doing so made our food supply highly vulnerable to disease.... and inflated prices when it goes wrong.'

Either Labour is planning on taking on corporate power in the food system in a major way while implementing a far more radical land use policy than I anticipated ... or this is going to be truly damaging for UK nature and food security.

As the CCC recently highlighted, the bold environmental promises the Prime Minister made at COP29 are effectively nonsensical without a transformation of UK farming and land use.

This is quite something. The SFI is/was a crucial enabler for restoring nature, mitigating climate change and alleviating downstream flooding. This further damage farmers who've seen their basic payments cut 76% this year alone.