Cost Of Living Champion Lord Walker: Rejoining The Single Market “Would Be A Terrible Idea”
Photography by Roy J Baron
10 min read
The government’s cost of living champion, Lord Walker, tells Noah Vickers about defecting from the Tories to Labour, Keir Starmer’s future and why rejoining the single market would be ‘a terrible idea’
Across Britain, almost two years after Labour won a landslide election victory promising to fix the cost of living crisis, millions of families are still unable to keep their homes warm or to access essential dental treatment, while millions more are skipping meals as they struggle to afford food.
The government’s recently appointed ‘cost of living champion’ is not one of them and never has been.
Lord Walker, the multi-millionaire boss of Iceland supermarkets, freely admits that he has never personally struggled with living costs. But that doesn’t mean he’s the wrong man for the job, he insists.
“I make no secret of the fact that I’m very privileged in my background,” the 45-year-old peer tells The House.
“I’ve come from a very entrepreneurial family. Both my granddads, who I never met, died very young. They were both coal-miners who worked their fingers to the bone… I think because of that, mum and dad always knew what a hard day’s graft was, so I grew up with that work ethic.”
Richard Walker, as he was then, served as Iceland’s managing director from 2018 before taking over as executive chairman in 2023 from his father Malcolm, who co-founded the business in 1970. Working at Iceland brings with it an insight into the experiences of people from more humble starts in life, he says: “Given our business, we do see, feel and hear a lot of the issues on a daily basis that our customers are facing.”
Reporting directly to the Prime Minister, who he meets every few weeks, Walker says his job is to “bring some critical outside thinking” into government and to “stress-test some of the ideas already percolating within No 10” about how to reduce people’s daily costs.
He admits that, as a policy area, the cost of living is “an impossibly broad remit”. He is “zeroing in”, therefore, “on a few key territories where I think policy can be enhanced and improved, but also, to be frank, where I think I can make a quick impact and a difference”.
When The House sits down with Walker, he has just returned from a meeting with Kate Dearden, the consumer protection minister, to discuss the government’s work tackling “subscription traps”. From spring 2027, subscription services will be required to provide customers with reminders when their free trial is ending or when their annual contract is being automatically renewed.
But Walker is also working with the government to explore how sidecar savings, liquid savings accounts connected to a pension plan, and child trust funds could be used to provide a “buffer” for Britain’s lowest-income families. He is eager, too, to widen access to “responsible credit”, as he warns too many people are still being driven into the hands of loan sharks.
As part of his role, Walker has been given a private secretary in No 10 and plans to work with an existing Downing Street ‘sprint team’ solely focused on slashing living costs.
The team, he says, are bringing with them a “private sector mentality and trying to just get shit done – and not machinate and pontificate too much but actually make deliverable interventions at pace”.
Walker accepted the job – an unpaid post – on two conditions: “One – I’m not going to stick around and I’ll give it to the end of the year. Two – I am allowed the freedom to say what I think.”
Does that mean he’ll have finished his work by Christmas?
“We’ll see,” he replies. “What I didn’t want to do is be there forever, and write a very long, 100-page report that no one would read. I’m just interested in meaningful interventions and trying to make a difference. It is early days… but I think to try and put an end-stop date to it is important because it drives a sense of urgency and pace.”
Walker’s appointment to the role in February came less than a month after he took his seat in the Lords as a Labour peer – but his path to Parliament was not straightforward. Until the last election, he had only ever voted for the Conservatives, to whom he donated £10,000 in 2020.
In a letter to Rishi Sunak in 2023, he said it was his “most fervent wish” to become a Tory parliamentary candidate, having “given my all to earning that privilege”.
By that point, Walker says he had spent two years door-knocking and leafleting for the party in the hope of being selected for a constituency at the general election.
“I did feel I was being given the endless runaround by CCHQ [Conservative Campaign Headquarters],” he says. “This was a long, committed process. I was not so arrogant to think I could just parachute in and bag a seat.”
Walker says his candidacy was repeatedly deferred, as the party told him he was being too outspoken on issues like sewage in Britain’s seas. But he says he had also become disillusioned by the Tories’ ideological direction.
“I just did not like the aping Reform kind of way that the politics was going. I could see the writing on the wall, and I think I’ve been broadly vindicated in them becoming a bit of a tribute band and this existential crisis they’re now having.”
There was nothing opportunistic, he insists, about his decision to switch his support to Labour in early 2024, and he points out that he has “never donated a penny” to the party.
“I was very clear I’m done with chasing the unicorn of trying to be an MP and we never even discussed this place,” he says, referring to the Lords. He was “blown away”, therefore, by the call from Downing Street offering him the peerage late last year.
Endorsing the party is one thing, but taking the Labour whip in Parliament is clearly another. Having backed the Tories almost all his life, what exactly are his politics?
“I’m kind of a pragmatist, being a businessman. I’m obviously pro-market and pro-business,” he says, before adding: “I’ve always wanted to push an agenda that I suppose is centrist, but looks after those people who don’t have broad shoulders… I have, and continue to develop, quite a strong social conscience, which I think sits very well with a centre-left agenda.”
In a previous interview, Walker said described his father as “more a Farage fan”. How did Malcolm Walker react to seeing his son sworn in as a Labour peer?
“He was very proud,” Walker laughs, before admitting: “As the photos were being taken in the Robing Room afterwards, he did under his breath shout ‘Vote Reform!’”
Walker’s peerage may also have come as a surprise given how publicly lukewarm he had been about Labour’s first year in government.
I’m not going to give a running scoreline. I’ll give you a score at the end of year
In a February 2025 interview with the Financial Times, he warned that the decision to hike employers’ national insurance contributions had “added greatly to the cost of business” and he gave the government a measly score of six out of 10 for its performance thus far. Would he give it a higher score now?
“It haunts me, this question,” he exclaims. “I’m not going to give a running scoreline. I’ll give you a score at the end of year.”
Has the cost of living got better for people since Labour took office?
“I think it’s kind of some and some,” is his answer. While his opinion of the employer’s national insurance hike has not changed, he argues that the decision to increase the minimum wage to £12.71 per hour “is a good thing which will filter through”. He adds, however: “Clearly there have been some things that have been out of their control. I think the two biggest concerns are food and energy.
“At the moment, [with] food inflation, we’re OK, but clearly everyone is watching, praying and hoping that Hormuz will be reopened and things will be resolved. We’ll see what the next energy cap is, but hopefully we can get through the summer, and when heating usage goes up, we’re in a more stable environment.”
One major cost that hits households each month is council tax, charged according to what properties were worth in 1991. It has become an increasingly regressive system, with the Resolution Foundation finding that it now takes nearly five per cent of income from the poorest families but only one per cent from the richest. Shouldn’t the government reform it?
“I agree, and I’ve raised it with them. It isn’t a system which is up to date,” he says. “If there’s the political will and the room to manoeuvre, it should be looked at.”
Walker voted for Brexit in 2016 but has been disappointed by how it turned out: “I’m not quite sure we got to the sunny uplands that Lords Hannan and Gove promised us.”
While he has welcomed the government’s work building a closer relationship with the EU, he does not think it should go as far as taking the UK back into the single market, as London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has pushed for. “It would be a terrible idea, politically, socially. There was enough of a row over Brexit.”
Is there an economic case for it? “Obviously there’s economic arguments, but we’ve been there and done that,” he replies. “We’ve had the vote, so we can’t go back there.”
He is less willing to pin his colours to the mast when asked whether the government should grant licences to drill the Jackdaw gas field and Rosebank oil field. Despite the question sitting at the centre of a policy debate over whether increased North Sea drilling could reduce energy bills – even if only slightly – the peer says he is “not an expert” on the issue, though he finds it “interesting”.
Walker is speaking to The House in the days ahead of Labour’s disastrous local election results and the subsequent turbulence at Downing Street, but even in advance of those elections, the opinion polls are clear that Keir Starmer is profoundly unpopular across the country. Does he have no sympathy with Labour MPs already calling on him to stand aside?
“No, none at all. I think that’s where they get too consumed in this place. The guy won an absolutely thumping majority, with a record number of seats. He was given a very clear mandate from the British people and it’s his duty to get on and deliver that.
“Opinion polls will bounce around – you’re right, of course, the current ones are pretty rough reading – but he is a man of integrity and of duty, and he wants to see it through, of course.”
While tackling the cost of living remains a top priority for the government, Walker is clear that the issue should be viewed not just in terms of the base cost of products, but in the full context of whether wages are keeping up with them.
“But actually, I think it goes beyond that,” he says, “towards a sense of life being a daily grind. By that, I mean people feeling that there’s an injustice to a system, or they’re getting caught out, or they can’t just catch a beat.
“I don’t think anyone is expecting the price of stuff to go down, long-term. In fact, I’d hope it doesn’t, because then we’d be in a Greek-style deflationary environment, it wouldn’t be a good thing.
“But I do think people should expect a government to work as hard as they can to make interventions where they can.”
