- guardian.co.uk, Thursday September 14 2000 03.36 BST
Alan Milburn, the health secretary, said the fuel blockade was hitting the NHS hard. "Operations are being cancelled. Drugs, food and medical supplies are now running short. The NHS is increasingly unable to do its job properly," he said.
His department published a list of pressures on health and social services affecting every part of England. Central blood stocks will last four days. Critical points are currently Oxford and Southampton where collections are down 40%, a spokesman said.
In the northern and Yorkshire region, the Royal Hull hospital ran out of stitches for use in operations and Dewsbury health care trust cancelled elective admissions for the rest of the week. South Tyneside and Friarage hospitals said they had serious difficulty removing clinical waste.
In the south-east of England, hospitals said patients were cancelling appointments because of transport difficulties. Portsmouth's pharmacies were reduced to two days' supplies and Surrey's petrol-driven ambulances were expected to stay on the road for no more than 24 hours.
Hospitals in Portsmouth were running short of drugs, particularly for renal dialysis. All elective surgery was cancelled in Milton Keynes and West Kent said problems in removal of clinical waste would soon be a health hazard.
In the south-west, hospitals reported increased numbers of 12-hour trolley waits for patients. Many trusts said they had only two days supplies of linen left. Avon and Western Wiltshire mental healthcare trust will run out today.
Cornwall health authority said it had three days of food left, 36 hours of laundry and oxygen was becoming scarce. United Bristol healthcare trust cancelled cardiac operations because staff could not get in to work. Across the region, beds were not becoming free because patients were not being discharged.
In the West Midlands, Hereford, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Staffordshire declared the situation a "major incident". The Royal Shrewsbury hospital said it would run out of food by the end of the week. Cancellation of elective surgery was imminent.
North of the border, the Scottish ambulance service was preparing to refuse to respond to all non-emergency calls.
Across London, non-urgent outpatient appointments were cancelled. Guy's and St Thomas's stopped discharging patients living outside the capital.
In the north-west, Wigan ambulance service ran out of fuel. Hospitals in Wigan, Leigh and Morecambe Bay cancelled non-emergency operations. North Mersey warned that community nursing would not be available by the end of the week tomorrow. [John Carvel]
Food
The supermarket chain Safeway was prompted to introduce rationing of bread and milk at its stores as customers continued to clear the shelves of staple items.
Store managers were limiting purchases because they had seen evidence of increased demand for bread and milk. The amount of rationing varied from store to store at the discretion of the manager, according to a spokeswoman.
However, deliveries were still getting through and in many cases, rationing was lifted as soon as new supplies arrived.
Panic buying continued in shops and supermarkets across the country as it emerged that fresh food could run out by the weekend.
Staff at Asda, which has 240 stores around the UK, said customers were buying more bread and milk than usual, but fresh food deliveries were continuing to reach its stores.
If there were any gaps on the shelves, it was because customers were buying more food than normal.
But food distributors Eddie Stobart, based in Carlisle, said that 700 of its 1,000 trucks had now run out of fuel. The company carries out 1,000 deliveries a day to supermarkets and said it could no longer guarantee food deliveries.
Dale Foster, transport director of the company, said: "We have been in touch with our fuel suppliers and we don't know when the next delivery is coming. We have very little left and will decide what deliveries take priority.
"We will be able to deliver supermarket supplies and other priority deliveries, but we will still be losing hundreds of thousands of pounds each day."
Customers appeared to be clearing the shelves of smaller stores as well as supermarkets. Grocery chain Spar, which has 2,700 shops in the UK, said food sales had increased by 300% in recent days. The Food and Drink Federation said that many of its members had contingency supplies of raw materials and fuel. "These measures should enable most manufacturers to carry on producing the nation's food for some time, but it is imperative that government resolve this crisis as soon as possible," said a spokeswoman. [Helen Carter]
Post offices and banks
Mail deliveries are already facing disruption while banks could run out of cash next week if the fuel shortage escalates.
The Post Office yesterday sounded alarm bells over its ability to continue delivering post in the coming days. "Unless these issues are resolved soon, we'll be facing serious disruption," a Post Office spokesman said.
The Post Office, which has suspended one service guaranteeing next day delivery, is to prioritise deliveries between post offices, the spokesman said. This is designed to ensure that social security payments are not disrupted.
The spokesman refused to specify how long the Post Office would be able to maintain deliveries of post and parcels from its 36,000-strong fleet of vehicles. "Fuel stocks are very low," he said.
Representatives of the high street banking groups were yesterday in talks with the government about ensuring that armoured vehicles were able to keep their petrol tanks full. The vehicles are needed to transport cash and cheques between bank branches and from retailers to put into banks and cash machines.
A spokesman for Apacs, the Association for Payment Clearing Services, said the banks were dusting down the contingency plans designed for potential cash shortages during the millennium bug scare at the start of this year. [Jill Treanor]
Business
The fuel crisis is costing British business £250m a day, the London Chamber of Commerce warned last night as companies started to halt production lines and lay off workers.
Simon Sperryn, chief executive of the Chamber, said his members understood the frustration of protesters about the high cost of fuel but called on them to let business get back to normal working.
He said the figures of losses were based on estimates that roughly 10% of the economy's daily output was being lost through disruption.
The Confederation of British Industry said its members were scaling back their operations. If things did not improve by the weekend "large parts of the economy would grind to a halt", said CBI director-general, Digby Jones.
Kingfisher, which owns store groups such as B&Q and Woolworths, admitted it would run out of fuel today although it insisted it was not yet suffering any downturn in sales at its out of town sites.
The kinds of pressures being faced by small businesses were expressed by Dustyn Etherington, proprietor of bespoke framemaking business, Frameworx in Taunton, Devon. He said: "People are not picking up their finished frames because they do not want to use their cars and suppliers say they have run out of fuel. I have rents and outgoings to pay and I'm not insured for any of this. Its all a bit frightening." [Terry Macalister]
Schools
Councils struggling to keep schools running are telling teachers to report to their nearest school if they are unable to get to their normal place of work.
In the north-west, Rochdale council has called on employees to get to work "any way they can" in order to maintain services and has said it will keep schools going even if they have to be run by teachers who usually work somewhere else.
Similar steps are being taken or being considered in Devon and other, more rural, parts of England and Wales where teachers and pupils alike are facing particular difficulties in getting to school because of the fuel shortage.
Bus operators with school run contracts were yesterday again being told to take children to school only if they had enough fuel to be able to take them home again.
Against expectation, Somerset managed to keep all its schools open yesterday after fears that teachers at rural primary schools would not be able to get to work. But other parts of the country are already bracing themselves for closures.
Schools in Dewsbury in west Yorkshire may have to close tomorrow while in south Wales, Rhondda Cynon Taff expects all or nearly all of its 19 secondary schools will be closed today because of problems with school transport for 12,000 pupils.
North Lanarkshire council in Scotland stopped all school bus services and many school services in the Borders were axed. [Geoffrey Gibbs]
Public transport
Buses and trains across the country will run out of fuel tomorrow if the government does not guarantee deliveries, transport operators warned last night.
Stagecoach spokesman Barry Gardner said: "Three-quarters of buses are able to transport commuters until Friday night. If fuel does not get through, we will have to remove services from Saturday."
In Gwent and the Rhondda Valley, buses were stopping at 7pm and half of the services were cancelled. In Cheltenham and Gloucester, services were down by 12% and Oxford inner city buses were cut by half. Rural areas of Lancashire will have no buses this weekend.
In Edinburgh, the main bus operator, Lothian buses, cancelled all services after 6.30pm. They will resume at rush hour this morning, but the company warned of total cancellation by tomorrow.
Transport For London yesterday told the government the capital needs 10 tankers of emergency fuel per day to keep buses, traffic lights and underground emergency response units running. But no fuel reached London buses yesterday and between 20-25 garages were expected to run dry today. A spokesman said London buses could come to a halt early next week.
Dennis Lovett from Virgin trains said the cross-country Aberdeen to Penzance diesel service had enough fuel to last until midnight tonight.
But trains were crowded, with Virgin sending office staff to sell tickets and man platforms. Passengers with pre-booked tickets either failed to receive them because of postal delays, or could not get to the station because of lack of petrol. Virgin trains ran late from Edinburgh because drivers could not get to work due to blockades and First Great Western were yesterday booking hotels for staff without petrol for the trip home.
Electric transport was also crowded. Tram passengers in Manchester were advised not to travel at peak times and Mersey Rail Electrics increased its trains from three cars to six.
Most London taxi fleets were yesterday carrying account holders only. Manchester firms were not pre-booking and predicted an average wait of one hour. [Angelique Chrisafis]
