Lord Redwood has said the government is “the villain” in the cost of living due to its policies on energy and food production.

Speaking on GB News, he said: “I think this is diversionary tactics by the prime minister. There may be individual hard cases. It may be you can improve the regulatory framework even more but there is already a regulatory framework to stop malpractice.

“But this is not what is causing the main pressure on family budgets. And it’s about food prices and energy prices. The government is the villain on the energy prices; the carbon taxes and the extreme net zero policies are giving us uniquely expensive energy in this country.

“And they won’t even cut the VAT when the oil price is very high on the fuel that we need to get to work and run the vans and whatnot.

“Gas has to be the big backup and then of course we’re paying twice because we have to pay for the wind when it isn’t working, and we have to pay for the gas backup, so no wonder we’ve got very dear electricity because they’ve got the wrong policy.

“So the government should apologise on energy and get the prices down by reducing its huge and grotesque tax take on people trying to struggle with the family energy bill.

“And on the food, we need much more British farmed food, and the government talks that occasionally, but it doesn’t do it.

“And it’s doing everything in its power to demolish agricultural food production in this country, covering places with much more profitable solar panels, giving them grants to not farm, to do wilding instead of putting proper crops in and giving them no help on the difficult problems they got at the moment with fertiliser prices through the roof and with a shortage of water, meaning that the crops are not yielding as much as they can.

“We’ve got a food shortage coming up from Britain, and the British government is making it worse.”