Supermarkets: Coronavirus

(asked on 25th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the sufficiency of the number of refrigerated vans to meet the increased demand for grocery deliveries during the covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Victoria Prentis Portrait
Victoria Prentis
Attorney General
This question was answered on 21st April 2020

The Government has well-established ways of working with the food industry during disruption to supply situations. Our retailers have highly resilient supply chains and have adapted quickly to these changes in demand to ensure people have the food and products they need. While we have had, and continue to have significant discussions with retailers over this period these issues have not arisen specifically. Deliveries both to stores and to people’s homes play an important role, and retailers and suppliers are best placed to make decisions about logistics and distribution.

We have been supporting the industry in their response to this unprecedented situation by introducing measures to help businesses to keep food supply flowing. These include temporary relaxation of competition laws to allow supermarkets to work together, extending delivery hours to supermarkets and flexing rules on drivers’ hours to allow a higher frequency of deliveries to stores.

Reticulating Splines