In an Efficiently-Run Health Service All ambulance stations would have their own bulk-fuel-tanks & pumps.
The government could then aggree bulk-purchase prices for the fuel and contracts which would Prioritise NHS Fuel-Deliveries. - It's just unfortunate that the overpaid managers within the NHS haven't realised this !
I don't think they could have done anything about it in the timescale given their budgets and lack of resources and infrastructure needed to make this change on any realistic timescale. The fault lies with policy makers ie politicians and very senior civil servants. The government is trying to cope with two huge structural changes, Brexit and Covid, only a national plan can make a difference in on an acceptable time-scale.
The business model of resilient supplies of fuel and goods that you refer to went out in the 1980s. Up to then most large enterprises valued resilience more than today, and accepted the additional cost it imposed. Supplies weren't as readily available in the past, so most companies kept their own stock. However running services started to become expensive as professionalism and standards rose. Enterprises that had their own fuel supply found that the standard of the tanks started to change, they had to be put it underground and then they had to be bunded and systems put in place to prevent leakages, the expertise required to maintain such systems went beyond the level of the employees and in-house engineering. This happened across to board, ancillary services such as IT, catering, waste management, etc all started to be burdensome, to the point where these services were farmed out to specialist companies. The main OEM (eg car company) or service organisation (eg hospital or ambulance service) instead focused on what they were specialist at. So the NHS and most companies got rid of their fuel depots and used the services of a local supplier that specialised in providing the service. This allowed standards to rise and costs to fall. Many companies did away with storage tanks - they are expensive to maintain and those who supplied the service, saw utilisation of their resource shoot up as efficiencies could be made ( this was a general trend, not just fuel tanks, but for waste management, IT cloud, catering and so on). Stocks require financing through working capital, so reduced stocks in the system allowed organisations to reduce their financing costs. This reduction in cost/waste is
at the expense or resilience to supply shocks. For most of the time, its not been an issue, there have been lots of reliable suppliers, plenty of choice was available, so the need for resilience was not an issue. The EU single market accellerated this change. As individual country markets got knitted togetehr under the EU single market more efficent supply chains and more choice was avaialbe (similar to that in the USA), This provied a degree of resilence as more supply options became economic in a large integrated market. However Brexit and Covid have both disrupted the efficiency of JIT supply chains, one was deliberate policy on behave of the UK government, it chose to exit the large integrated market of the EU to protect the workforce in a smaller UK market - that was a rational choice, but Covid was unexpected. Unfortunately the politics of Brexit meant that very little planning was put into managing the disruption to supply chains in the UK, the political impasse under Mrs May and then Johnson's choice of pushing for a quick, and hard, Brexit meant time was not made available to put in place new supply chains, resilience, extra storage and facilities etc.
I don't think its fair to blame the NHS's managers for the current state of affairs, the infrastructure was not there for them, and they really did NOT know what kind of supply chain to plan for under Brexit or Covid. These things take time, you need to buy new infrastructure. I do think that politicians and civil servants are culpable, they were warned by the RHA about the effects of both Brexit and Covid and were largely ignored - I remember politicians poo pooing their warnings as 'project fear'. Also shutting down the countries strategic storage facilities of oil and gas (Rough held 5 billion m3 or 25 days supply for the whole country, it was closed in 2017), to save money by the government over the past 10 years, they were made aware of the risks but thought that the new interconnectors to Norway and Holland would give us relicense, it was naive, it overlooked a couple of obvious flaws, i) in a global shortages (such as gas), then nations will look after their own citizens first, that should have bee foreseen. (ii)At the time, policy makers were motivated to get fuel bills down as there was political pressure from Labour about the squeezed middle. In reality food and fuel are comparatively cheap by historical standards, the squeezed middle is due to high housing which is at an all time record. These are failures of public policy not of individual organisations like the NHS.
Once the government had deiced on a hard Brexit, it should have planned to implemented it, which would have meant a delay to restricting free movement of people, a phase down on visas etc to allow time put in place more resilient supply chains, ie trained more HGV drivers, build more storage etc. Put in boarder infrastructure to cope with the extra inspections required by leaving the customers union and single market. Rotterdam did that, once they saw the direction of travel of Brexit, they invested in the infrastructure to cope with what as anticipated under the new trading regime. This shortage were foreseen, but those advocating adjustment and delay over Brexit, were not seen as wise planners but were lumped in with the 'supposedly disloyal remainers'. It was not politically acceptable to warn of problems, even if those warnings were being made by apolitical organisations that understood what needed to change.
Our national newspapers were partly culpable, they made it impossible to distinguish between technocrats trying to prepare for a difficult change with those politically active against Brexit. The two groups got lumped together in the press and so active planning became a political impossibility.
Covid is the other big disrupter, but again its been characterised by continued failures to anticipate and prepare for quite obvious changes. Nearly every move by the government - apart form vaccine role out - has been behind the curve, lockdowns were delayed resulting in a worse situation for the NHS that otherwise would have been, and that led to longer lockdowns, we only have to look over the channel to see how Germany, Italy, Spain and France handled the same issues. We still don't have a Covid task force to co-ordinate activities right across government, led by a senior cabinet minister, it is still left for individual departments to plan and muddle along. There is now talk of re-opening Rough to cope with decarbonisation. It could have been opened a year ago and filled up with cheap oil and gas when the market was making too much - that would have helped the industry adjust to falling demand at the time and helped North Sea companies manage the unusual swings on their businesses. The USA did just that , they topped up their strategic oil reserve when oil was virtually free. We could then draw on this reserve to buffer the current shortage of gas and rising oil prises.
I could go on -
What is really important is that we need to pull together as a country and population.
A lot of the issues right now are beyond the capacity or single organisations to sort out on their own, so we should not be blaming them or the public. We need some co-ordinated action across many sectors to sort the distribution problems out.
What is emerging is, that its government policy is to allow the shortage of EU labour to drive up salaries in labour intensive sectors. This was news to me and I suspect most of the population. Its not an unreasonable policy or goal for post Brexit. But such a huge shift in policy need proper planning. The policy needs to be set out so we understand it and its implications - a proper white paper setting out the goals for wages and supply in different sectors. A plan put in place to manage the change. To achive such a goal will need investment in new capital assets to enable labour productivity to rise, otherwise we will end up with stagflatoin and continued shortages. The UK was an outlier in Europe for using cheap labour in place of productivity investment, we have some of the lowest levels of robotics in the OECD, we have some of the lowest levels of capital deployed in the OECD, so we can make the change by copying good practice in France or Germany. This wont change overnight, it needs a 3 or 5 year plan. We need temporary visas to enable supermarkets and gas stations to be supplied. The NHS and care-homes are desperately short of labour as is the entertainment sector. They need time to adjust, something like a sliding scale of visa restrictions and some help in investing in automation, robotics, etc. We need to re-hire the EU vets that manned our abattoirs etc, and then manage the workforce down in an orderly way as rising salaries attract new workers and industry invests in automation to cope with shortfalls. Its an economic model that works in other countries, France is a good example of generally lower labour levels but with high productivity aided by high levels of capital investment. These things cant be done overnight, as workers need to be trained and upskilled. In effect we deploy UK works into sectors that need labour, such as transport and care-homes, NHS etc and we do that by raising salaries in those sectors. In other sectors such as food production, services and industry, we allow for labour to leave those industries by automating the roles as happens in France and Germany, many jobs can be replaced with machines and re-deploy the freed up labour to areas where people are irreplaceable such as in care, etc. That also needs salaries in those sectors to raise substantially, probably by 30%, again this needs a bit of time to happen otherwise general inflation will lift off and consumers will struggle to pay for the extra costs. I presume that is what government ministers mean when they go on the telly and tell companies to raise wages. The care-sector is publicly funded, so where is the money coming from to raise wages in care-homes? Another hike in tax?
My great worry is that ministers will just talk these changes but not actually roll up their sleeves to implement a plan. We will run from crisis to crises and make no meaningful progress with quite die economic results. Firstly the agricultural and food sector will shrink quite quickly as it wont find the labour to grow, prepare and butcher our food. We will therefore need to import more food. The restaurant and entertainment sectors will suffer in a similar way, it will put up prices and shrink in size. As these big sectors shrink in size so will the UK economy. That will lead to unemployment is certain sectors, but labour shortages in others as the structural issues in the country remain un-addressed. It will also lead to lowering of tax returns to the government, exasperating its already huge problems and may even cause a loss in confidence in our financial control by the city etc, which will then lead to higher interest rates and we will find ourselves in the sort of structural pickle that Italy has been battling for the past 20 years. Its probably at that time that voices will emerge pressing us to re-join the EU.
The irony for this government, is it wont necessarily be because Brexit was a mistake - in their terms, but by botching Brexit, they wont have given it a chance to work. The belated and botched attempts to deal with the economic and structural fall out from COVID is only making things worse.
What can we do. I do think we should pull together and support people during this crisis. Also we may be able to help the government see its way through, there are such real dangers to our economy right now that, in the national interest we should pull together to support those in power to work things through even whatever their political colour, at least if they can see the dangers ahead they may act.
my point is that we need to reduce the cost of living ( especially for low earners ) rather than increase low wages......
My respond is simply: “paying a lots of VAT and Income tax, so you can stay on doll, and not suddenly want to steal my foreigner job as UK business owner”
