Over the past decade, world prices of key resources have risen sharply, meaning prices paid by UK households for food and energy have gone up much more quickly than other prices. This infographic demonstrates that, if resource prices had just kept pace with other consumer prices, the average household could have saved over £1,000 on its food and household energy bills in 2012. And the poorest will be the hardest hit. If this trend continues, by 2020 household food and energy bills could have risen by another £1,675 over and above general inflation.

The only reliable way to protect the UK economy against these resource price shocks in future is to improve radically the efficiency of our resource use and reuse, reducing dependency on foreign imports.