“Credibility, not compulsion” is needed to mend fences with a public distrustful of pricing for essential items, the Chamber of Commerce has declared in a review of cost-control measures proposed by the Government.

In a document framed as offering a voice for consumers, the chamber reiterated its opposition to the Cost of Living Commission Amendment (No 2) Bill 2026, which was passed in July by the House of Assembly but delayed by the Senate after resistance from retailers.

The legislation is expected to go back to the Upper House for its third reading after the Senate resumes.

This week, the chamber highlighted a “trust deficit” among consumers amid an “affordability crisis”.

It said residents had watched grocery prices “rise steadily from 2015 through 2026 — and sharply from 2022 — and have concluded, reasonably, that someone in the chain must be making excess money”.

It added that the “frustration is real”, and suggested reporting of pricing in a way that “gives the citizen who is sceptical of retail margins an assurance they can read and rely on”.

It said its response to the legislation was driven by “the belief that a good-faith exchange about what actually works is more useful to the family standing in the grocery aisle than any legislation that misfires the diagnosis”.

The chamber likened the obligation for grocery retailers to “file the components behind the price — landed cost, freight, markup — with a regulator” to heavy-handed “interventionist economies” elsewhere in the globe, where attempts at market control sparked shortages and food inflation.

Titled The Cost-of-Living Bill: A Fuller Picture, it critiqued the legislation’s core means of “compulsory monthly cost filing, a 5 per cent notice-and-freeze, ministerial power to disallow” as simplistic and prone to backfiring.

The document argued that forcing firms to hand over their cost-structuring details would leave businesses exposed without “meaningful confidentiality protection” — and that competitive pressure among retailers “already performs much of the work that cost-disclosure regimes claim to perform”.

As alternatives, the chamber proposed several measures it described as more efficient, avoiding “a compliance regime” and “a rearmed price-control power”.

These include:

• An independent summary of how costs get passed on to consumers, following a published methodology, so that “duty relief can be shown to have reached the shelf without a compulsory apparatus”

• A “freight-cost offset for essential imports”, funded from “sin-tax receipts”, that could cut landed costs “universally, without picking winners at the shelf”

• Cutting the 75 per cent sugar tax, which the chamber said targeted an everyday item

• Improve the sharing of pricing details brought in the March 2026 Cost of Living Commission Amendment Act 2026 using private-sector price feeds

• Have the commission inquire in cases where “pricing decision warrants further explanation”, instead of giving prior approval to pricing

• Develop an independently run Bermuda grocery code of conduct instead of price control.

The Chamber of Commerce document also highlighted potential for overreach in the legislation from July.

It argued that cost disclosure “once established as a principle for one sector has no natural stopping point written into the Bill” and, beyond grocers, could end up being applied to “any other business that sells to a Bermudian household”.

The chamber’s analysis offered a detailed breakdown of factors contributing to the “bundle” of what the island’s consumers wanted, and said that its analysis of other jurisdictions that undertook similar moves had found consumers getting disadvantaged.

It said products could end up being “withdrawn from the shelf” if their landed cost could not be recovered, and that the legislation risked favouring bigger businesses able to absorb compliance costs that “smaller operators cannot”.

It added that the legislation’s pressure on margins for perishable items risked threatening quality, and that compliance costs could hurt outlets such as a small corner store versus a chain of businesses.

The chamber further argued that the legislation failed to address “the actual cost drivers” such as freight, duty and foreign currency purchase tax.

It added: “The scale problem is easy to illustrate: landed cost (goods, freight and duty) typically makes up roughly 40 to 50 per cent of the shelf price for many grocery items, so a five percentage-point duty cut lowers the shelf price by only around 2 to 2.5 per cent, not 5 per cent.

“A movement that small is easily lost inside the week-to-week price fluctuations that landed and local costs already produce.

“The costs of acquiring goods and providing services are in constant flux, which is exactly why the relief can be real and still be genuinely hard for a shopper to see.”

Additionally, with a series of “fact checks”, the chamber pushed back on how the Ministry of Home Affairs characterised the legislation.

The commission was moved from the finance ministry to home affairs in 2020, under legislation that purported to offer consumers a database illustrating the cost of essentials in different stores.

The chamber stated that there had been an implication that businesses had “failed to comply with data requests”, making the legislation’s “coercive” powers a necessary move.

It added: “The commission has been under mandatory duties of its own since 2022 — a public price database (June 2022) and weekly publication (November 2022) — and has delivered neither.

“Two grocers have publicly supplied data, and shelf prices are already public in real time at pronto.bm, dropit.bm, shop.miles.bm and marketplace.bm.

“On the available evidence, business non-compliance is not established as the principal bottleneck.”

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Bermuda Chamber of Commerce- Cost of Living Response

• To read the chamber’s analysis in full, see Related Media