Contingency planning required for snow

With the snow and ice continuing to keep Britain in their frosty grip, business leaders have urged the Government to convene a special conference to review bad-weather contingency planning.

With Britain at a “standstill”, the Federation of Small Business (FSB) estimated that the bad weather had cost the UK economy around £600 million a day, as staff struggled to get to work.

There should, say the FSB, be discussions between local authorities, transport and salt mining companies, schools and businesses to find solutions in periods of bad weather.

The FSB says that many small firms have been forced to close, have lost business or seen their supplies run out because of transportation problems, as many roads have been unusable. School closures have meant parents have had to stay at home to look after their children.

We Brits never seem to learn lessons from bad weather, and we haven’t done so, even with last February’s snow still in the mind.

The FSB urged the Government to put an emergency grant scheme in place for small firms adversely affected by the snow, together with mandatory guidelines for local authorities regarding salt, and increase the nation’s salt supplies.