Spike in prices for long-life milk and tinned soup stockpiled during panic-buying frenzy

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A woman walks past empty shelves as they shop at Sainsbury's in Northwich
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Popular household shopping items such as tinned soup and long-life milk that were the stockpiled ahead of the lockdown have spiked in price, government data reveals today.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has created a new basket of “high demand products” to track price changes during the pandemic.

It shows that between the last week of March and the first week of this month some of supermarket grocery items in the basket saw unusually rapid rises in price.

The biggest increase was pet food which rose 6.2 per cent, followed by nappies up 5.8 per cent, tinned soup (4.9 per cent), long-life milk (4.5 per cent), pasta sauce (4.1 per cent), paracetamol (2.6 per cent) and dried pasta (2 per cent).

Across all the high-demand products as a whole the increase was 1.5 per cent over the week.

The figures, which were taken from retailers’ websites, are not expected to replace the official monthly Consumer Prices Index and are described as “experimental.”

But they do suggest that day-to-day living costs may be rising during the lockdown as families stuck at home spend more on food and other household items, pushing up demand.

The annual rise in the CPI was just 1.7 per cent last month.

It follows results from Tesco yesterday revealing that spending on food and other groceries had surged 30 per cent during the panic-buying last month.

Today’s data also showed that just over half of all adults said someone had offered to organise or bring food if they needed to self-isolate or became unwell.

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