Brexit's brutal impact on UK food prices confirmed by Bank of England official

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Brexit pushed UK food prices up 6%, Bank of England official says, as inflation hits peak high level in 41 years.

Dr Swati Dhingra also said that British workers had suffered a 2% reduction in real terms in their wages due to the UK's departure from the EU, while as members of the bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) appeared before the Treasury Committee of Parliament.

Live Standards are under immense pressure around the world this year due to inflation record high, particularly in food and energy prices, but Dr Dhingra said Britain would suffer more as a direct result of leaving the EU.

"It's undeniable now that we are seeing a much bigger slowdown in UK trade pa r compared to the rest of the world,” Dr Dhingra, who is also an associate professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), told MPS.

She said British households had seen their spending d food purchases increase by 6% compared to other countries in recent years, ref. recent research by LSE students looking at the impact of less favorable UK trading conditions since Brexit.

She added: "The simple way to think about what the Brexit has done to the economy is that in the period following the referendum, there has been the largest overnight depreciation of any of the world's four major economies.

"This helped raise prices and lower wages...we believe this figure is about 2.6% lower than the trend that otherwise real wages would have applied.

She said this was followed by a reduction in business investment and trade figures were now reacting to the impact of the Brexit deal the UK signed with the EU.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said the UK economy was recovering much worse from the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic than that of the region euro and the United States.

Despite this, he said, Brexit's impacts far had not been surprising and stalled by the bank's long-standing estimate that the UK productivity would see a long-term decline of around 3%.