My hon. Friend makes a good point. If he has a big problem with the middleman, so to speak, for example in the dairy industry, he should pursue his complaint with the middleman, rather than having a go at the supermarket.
The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) made a point about special offers. There is a view that supermarkets have been forcing suppliers against their will to do special offers, such as buy one, get one free or buy three for two. Let me tell the House, as somebody who has worked in this environment, what happens in the real world, rather than in the invented world that people want to talk about.
My hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) is here and he will know what happens as well as I do because he worked for Asda at the same time as I did. He will recall that, before I left, Asda decided that it did not want to do special offers any more and that it would have no special offers in its stores. It did not want any buy one, get one frees or three for twos. It asked its suppliers instead to just sell it the product at an everyday low price and to put what they would have invested in a promotion into providing that price. It was not companies such as Asda that were forcing suppliers to do buy one, get one frees; suppliers were falling over themselves to do special offers in the supermarkets and to get their products in the promotional areas.
Some of those firms have massive marketing budgets. They have marketing budgets that supermarkets would love to have. They use that budget to do offers such as buy one get one free or three for the price of two. They are trying to persuade people who buy Daz for their washing, for example, to move to Persil. To persuade people to do so, they give them a buy-one-get-one-free offer.