Anticipated impacts of Brexit scenarios on UK food prices and implications for policies on poverty and health: a structured expert judgement approach

TL;DR

This study uses expert judgment to project Brexit's impact on UK food prices, indicating significant increases that could worsen food insecurity and health outcomes, especially under a no-deal scenario.

Contribution

It applies structured expert elicitation to quantify potential food price changes under Brexit scenarios, providing probabilistic estimates for policy implications.

Findings

Brexit with a deal could increase food prices by approximately 6.1%.

No-deal Brexit could raise prices by about 22.5%.

Higher food prices are likely to increase food insecurity and health service demand.

Abstract

Food insecurity is associated with increased risk for several health conditions and with poor chronic disease management. Key determinants for household food insecurity are income and food costs. Whereas short-term household incomes are likely to remain static, increased food prices would be a significant driver of food insecurity. To investigate food price drivers for household food security and its health consequences in the UK under scenarios of Deal and No deal for Brexit . To estimate the 5\% and 95\% quantiles of the projected price distributions. Structured expert judgement elicitation, a well-established method for quantifying uncertainty, using experts. In July 2018, each expert estimated the median, 5\% and 95\% quantiles of changes in price for ten food categories under Brexit Deal and No-deal to June 2020 assuming Brexit had taken place on 29th March 2019. These were aggregated based on the accuracy and informativeness of the experts on calibration questions. Ten specialists in food procurement, retail, agriculture, economics, statistics and household food security. Results: when combined in proportions used to calculate Consumer Prices Index food basket costs, median food price change for Brexit with a Deal is expected to be +6.1\% [90\% credible interval:-3\%, +17\%] and with No deal +22.5\% [+1\%, +52\%]. The number of households experiencing food insecurity and its severity are likely to increase because of expected sizeable increases in median food prices after Brexit. Higher increases are more likely than lower rises and towards the upper limits, these would entail severe impacts. Research showing a low food budget leads to increasingly poor diet suggests that demand for health services in both the short and longer term is likely to increase due to the effects of food insecurity on the incidence and management of diet-sensitive conditions.