Iceland boss forced to shelve new store openings after latest energy bill rose by £20m

Managing director Richard Walker says frozen food retailer is ‘fighting to keep lights on’

The boss of supermarket giant Iceland says he has been forced to halt the opening of planned new stores after the latest energy bill for the chain rose by £20m.

Richard Walker, managing director of the frozen foods retailer, has contacted No 10 with an urgent plea to prepare an immediate cost of living package for businesses as many are concerned about surviving through the winter with the extortionate energy costs.

Mr Walker said his chain is “fighting to keep the lights on” after its recent energy bill more than doubled, and he is calling for an energy price cap for businesses in Britain.

He believes the next prime minister, whoever wins the leadership race on Monday, will need to “sort out our completely broken energy markets” in the longer term.

Iceland is ‘fighting to keep the lights on’, its boss has said (Getty)

The supermarket boss told The Guardian he is concerned about a “half-baked response” from whoever takes over from Boris Johnson which will fall way short of addressing people’s needs.

He said, for instance, that Liz Truss’s plans to cut business rates for small and medium businesses are “lovely” but it “won’t even touch the sides”.

Liz Truss is widely expected to win the Tory leadership race (AFP/Getty)

“What they need to understand is [this affects] big business as well as small, because it’s exactly the same trouble we’re in – there’s just more jobs at stake,” Mr Walker added.

He said Iceland is seeing its energy bills soaring more than other supermarkets as it is reliant on storing produce in fridges and freezers.

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Mr Walker said: “We’ve got to make decisions because we have got this unmanageable volatility.

“In some instances, it might just be easier to mothball shops or temporarily close them because the energy costs are just completely unsustainable.”

Mr Walker, who took over as the boss of Iceland from his father in 2018, said lots of his small and medium-sized suppliers are fearing collapse.

Plus Iceland is facing its worst crisis in 50 years with the rising energy prices plus wage inflation and labour shortages.

He said in the end Iceland will be “large and strong enough to ride out this storm” but many suppliers risk going bust, which will put thousands of jobs at risk.

The news comes as the energy price cap is set to rise by 80 per cent from 1 October 2022.

And, according to researchers at York University, by April next year the proportion of people spending more than a fifth of their net income paying for energy will go up from 32 per cent to 45.9 per cent.