We don't believe Which? here for a moment
Which? magazine wants us all to know that there are vast areas of the country which are “food deserts”. We do not believe this for a moment. It’s nonsense.
The big supermarkets need to step up support for low-income customers marooned in England’s “food deserts” to enable them to readily access healthy groceries during the cost of living crisis, according to the consumer group Which?.
The scarcity of affordable, healthy food is so acute in some of the poorest parts of Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford, Durham and the Welsh valleys that the vast majority of neighbourhoods in these areas should get targeted help, Which? says.
The study found nearly half of neighbourhoods in the north-east of England – and about a third in Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the north-west of England – lacked easy access to supermarkets, and had poor availability for online deliveries and low levels of car ownership, making it much harder for low-income households to put food on the table.
The reason it’s nonsense is in there, they’ve got the facts but don’t realise they do.
Just as an aside there’s some chatter about how there are more food banks in these “deserts”. Well, possibly the causation runs the other way? Who is going to set up a business selling food in an area where people get food for free?
But the nonsense. 20 years back the idea of food delivery to the home - of groceries, not a takeaway - was something limited to Hovis ads and they harked back near a century themselves. Today anyone in the country can book that online delivery from any of a number of different grocery suppliers.
We did in fact check this. A midweek delivery pass - which we believe means free deliveries on midweek days for one month - seems to cost £4. Perhaps we’ve not quite got that detail quite right but it does seem to be of that order. According to ONS the average household grocery bill is some £60 a week. Add a bit to that for the recent burst of inflation and call it £280 a month. The delivery cost is 1.5% or so of that bill.
This is not nothing, we agree, but it is pretty trivial. It’s most certainly less than the price difference between a full service supermarket and a corner store.
Which? is claiming that there are food deserts in Britain. When in fact each and everyone of us has a handful of supermarkets in our own front room - or wherever else we keep the computer, tablet or mobile phone. It’s simply nonsense. Abjectly so. Geographic access to good, cheap and nutritious food is better now than it ever has been in all of human history. This really isn’t the right time to be complaining about the lack of such access.
But then we suppose that these campaigning organisations do have to find something to complain about. Where would this form of indoor relief for the sprogs of the upper middle class be without something to whinge about, however absurd it might be?