Jack Monroe's campaign shows a single voice can provide hope for millions of people on low incomes - Greg Wright

In this cynical age, it’s worth remembering that social media can be a force for good in the hands of skilled communicators who are blessed with compassion, empathy and political nous.

Too frequently, Twitter is a place of division, where pundits strut and perform for their own select gallery. Dissenting voices are marginalised. It’s easy to rage against injustice, much harder to devise a campaign that causes lasting change.

So in this world of frenzied and often joyless tweeting, it’s refreshing to hail the success of a woman who spoke truth to power and made a difference. The food writer and campaigner Jack Monroe took to Twitter to express her frustration at the plight of families on low incomes who were struggling to afford their weekly shop.

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She also said the decreased availability of value product lines have severely hit poorer families.

Jack Monroe. Picture: Patricia Niven/PA.Jack Monroe. Picture: Patricia Niven/PA.
Jack Monroe. Picture: Patricia Niven/PA.

Ms Monroe was critical of the way that official inflation data is reported, claiming that poorer individuals were seeing a higher rise in the cost of living than had been reported.

She posted a series of tweets detailing how poor availability of value lines of some supermarket products, such as pasta, had resulted in shoppers only being able to purchase items which were triple the price.

She said this resulted in much greater inflationary pressure on poor families than shown by the 5.4% index reading.

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“It infuriates me the index that they use for this calculation, which grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least,” she posted.

She later took to Twitter to report: “Delighted to be able to tell you that the ONS have just announced that they are going to be changing the way they collect and report on the cost of food prices and inflation to take into consideration a wider range of income levels and household circumstances.”

The ONS had been in the process of adapting its inflationary measures for some time but confirmed it will dramatically widen the number of products it tracks the pricing of to give a better picture of inflation.

Mike Hardie, head of prices at the ONS, said: “We are currently developing radical new plans to increase the number of price points dramatically each month from 180,000 to hundreds of millions, using prices sent to us directly from supermarket checkouts.”

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But this was not the only significant breakthrough for Ms Monroe’s thoughtful and tenacious campaign.

The Leeds-based supermarket chain Asda has confirmed it will nearly double the number of stores that offer its lowest-priced value range to help tackle the cost-of-living crisis.

Ms Monroe tweeted: “I was very quick to vilify Asda for what I saw as a change of direction for their company, and a watering down of their commitment to an entire group of their customers. And to their credit, they read it all, and a LOT of your comments too, reached out, and said they’d do better.”

Meg Farren, Asda’s chief customer officer, said: “We want to help our customers’ budgets stretch further and have taken on board the comments about the availability of our Smart Price range made by Jack Monroe. We are taking steps to put our full Smart Price and Farm Stores ranges in store and online to make these products as accessible as possible.”

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Ms Monroe’s campaign is driven by her own experiences. She has told her 459,000 Twitter followers of the times when she had been “trying to work out what to put back, what to do without, out of a tenners worth of groceries that weren’t enough to start with”.

She added: “I’ve cried tears of humiliation when a shelf edge label turned out to be advertising an expired promotion, tipping my shopping over what I could afford from the six pounds or so in change - the only money I had in the world - in my hand.”

There is nothing more powerful than a personal story. Ms Monroe provided influential people with practical steps that could help ease the plight of millions of vulnerable. The ONS and Asda have listened. But her work is far from done. It’s up to policymakers and other retailers to step up to the plate and show they care.