Robert Peston

Limit those prices in return for the government waiving certain restrictions.

So, you know, some of the things that the supermarkets, as you know, complain about is that the...

Regulations on packaging or the regulations on promoting, well, not promoting unhealthy foods, they find quite expensive and restrictive.

And so the Treasury has been floating this idea of a sort of voluntary pact between supermarkets and the government, that on the one hand, the government would reduce some of these burdens in return for supermarkets to...

And essentially saying they will try and ease the price pressures in these important food categories and help, therefore, those on lowest incomes.

And before we get into it in detail, I should just say, having talked to the supermarket bosses, they almost all say this is completely and utterly ridiculous.

Barking mad.

And, you know, I mean, first of all, let me just ask you what you think of this as an idea.

And then let's drill down a little bit.

I don't agree with it.

So certainly the boss of a very big supermarket chain agrees with you.

I'm going to read what he texted me this morning.

He said, my advice to government would be to go back and look at all the regulatory burdens that customers are already paying for and the trade union rights bill, which will lead to a boom in human resources bureaucracy across Britain.

So he definitely agrees with you.

I mean, I suppose my take would be this.

There are issues around quite how...

competitive the supermarket sector is.

I have to say on one measure, it looks pretty competitive because the margin, that's the profit that supermarkets make as a percentage of sales is lower than in many other countries.

And that's normally some kind of measure of how competitive they are.

But actually, my view is simply this really, that if the government