The departure of Britain from the European Union is responsible for approx a third of the increase of household food bills from 2019, equivalent to around £250, researchers from the London School of Economics and other universities have announced.

For over a year, Britain has been giving fight inflation, which is partly boosted by the highest rise in food prices on record since 1977, with food prices rising by more than 19% over the past year.

Although London and Brussels have an agreement that allows food to be traded duty-free, barriers to exports and imports in the form of red tape, known as non-tariff barriers, cause delays and higher costs.

The Center for Economic Performance (CEP) study compared price changes in food products imported from the European Union with prices of food imported from further afield.

Before Brexit, the prices of these products recorded similar trends, but after Brexit there was a relative increase in the prices of products more exposed to imports from the EU, the study states, and this continued in 2023.

From the study it was established that from January 2022 to March 2023, the price of food products that were exposed to Brexit increased by around 3.5 percentage points more than those that were not.

When taking into account the impact on food prices from December 2019, just before Britain officially left the EU, the researchers estimated the cost of Brexit to British households at £6.95bn (€8m), or £250 per household.

From December 2019 to March 2023, the study found UK food prices rose by almost 25 percentage points.

“Our analysis shows that, had it not been for Brexit, this figure would have been 8 percentage points (30%) lower,” the CEP says.

Products with high non-tariff barriers, such as meat and cheese imported from the EU, saw price increases around 10 percentage points higher than similar products not exposed to Brexit after January 2021, when the Britain’s Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU comes into force.

Last week the Prime Minister’s spokesman Rishi Sunak argued that Britain’s departure from the European Union was not a failure, fending off criticism from prominent Eurosceptic politicians over the way Brexit was implemented.