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Hello and welcome to this new series of the bottom line.

And what a lot has been going on over the summer.

The goal of building back better has got off to a slow start with disrupted supply chains

more in the news than anyone ever thought possible.

But this is a theme that goes back some way.

Three years ago, in fact, we devoted a bottom line to the very topic.

Tim O'Malley from Nationwide Produce was talking about panic buying before it was fashionable.

Have you ever witnessed panic buying?

Yeah, we had it just a couple of years ago.

I think it started off that somebody couldn't find

corgettes in Waitrose and they were doing spaghetti-courgeti, which was quite trendy at the time. And then the tweet went viral with everybody else who shopped at Waitrose saying we can't find it either. And then before you know, there's a run on corgettes and there's a run on everything else. And do you remember on the bottom line of a year ago, Johnny Warburton talking about pandemic shortages.

You'd find the demand for something like... And do you remember on the bottom line of a year ago, Johnny Warburton talking about pandemic shortages?

You'd find the demand for something like good old white slice bread, which has been in decline for a generation real.

That suddenly just turned on its head and went back up again.

Well, clearly, the ability of the supply chains to keep serving us through difficult times last year

may have given us a false sense of security, because now, with an acute shortage of HGV drivers,

almost every piece of the economy is feeling a pinch of some kind.

Well, this is posited as a transitional pain, moving from one model of doing business

based on importing labour to another

based on making the best of the national population. So that's what we'll explore today.

We'll be speaking to Alan Manning from the London School of Economics, former chair of the

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