Robert Peston

putting the lid on the costs of essentials.

And in particular, if you look at a country like France, there was a sort of deal with the supermarkets there to limit the prices or to cap the prices of some

Because obviously, you know, when you have these price shocks, the impact, particularly on those on lower incomes, is really severe.

And so one of the things that the government has been looking at, and just to be clear, you know, we are recording this before COVID.

the Chancellor makes her announcement about what she's doing in terms of trying to help those on lowest incomes as a result of the price shock from Trump's Iran war.

But what is going on, I've talked to supermarket bosses about this, is this idea that somehow the supermarkets would volunteer

To limit the price of a number of essentials like milk and eggs and those products that we regard as absolutely core to nutrition.

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.