The claim
“It’s going to be perfectly satisfactory to have the 250,000 tonnes (of salt) delivered progressively during the course of December and into early January.”
Transport Secretary Philip Hammond, House of Commons debate, 2 December 2010
Cathy Newman checks it out
We were supposed to have learnt the lessons from last year’s snow chaos, when a lack of salt for the roads saw much of Britain brought to a standstill. The Transport Secretary Philip Hammond insisted that he wasn’t about to make the same mistake again.
The ink is barely dry on a review of the last winter crisis. But the transport secretary says he’s already implemented its recommendations, by importing a quarter of a million tonnes of salt. The only problem is, less than half of that grit has so far arrived. Labour says that matters – the government disagrees. So who’s right?
The background
After January’s snow the Department for Transport commissioned the Winter Resilience Review, into the supply and distribution of road salt. An interim report in July was welcomed by the government and the full version came out last month.
The review recommended that on top of salt stocks kept by the Highways Agency and local councils, an extra ‘strategic stock’ of 250,000 tonnes should be put in place.
In the Commons today, Phil Hammond said today that 107,000 tonnes has already been delivered, with the remainder to be delivered “over the next six weeks”.
The analysis
When the Winter Resilience Review was published, it issued an “urgent recommendation to Government that a quarter of a million tonnes should be procured by import, in time for the beginning of the season, as a strategic buffer stock for England’s highway authorities” (page 15).
This was the same recommendation that it had already made in its interim report in July – when it had actually been more precise with the timing: “We suggest a pragmatic 2-stage approach in which an initial quantity of 0.25m tonnes should be procured ahead of November 2010 and treated as strategic buffer stock; and then at the end of December 2010, this analysis should be updated against the latest forecast for the winter.”
In the summer the government appeared to accept this, and the Review issued a statement saying “July’s recommendation for the Government to import a quarter of a million tonnes of salt as a strategic reserve for next winter was accepted. Shipments have already started to arrive, with the majority of the salt expected to arrive in November.”
So why is less than half of the strategic supply actually in place?
We asked the Department for Transport about this. They pointed us to another of the report’s findings, which says: “the Highways Agency should be tasked, on behalf of the Secretary of State, to acquire by import, store and make available on terms to be agreed an initial reserve stock of some 0.25 million tonnes of salt for ‘last resort’ use by local highway authorities and for itself” but doesn’t say by when this should have been done. But as we’ve shown above, elsewhere in the report it does recommend “the beginning of the season.”
The Department for Transport stressed to FactCheck that despite what the report says, the “intention was not to have (these stocks) in place in their entirety” and pointed out that local councils have supplies of 1.2m tonnes on top of the Highways Agency’s stocks of 260,000 tonnes.
It’s also worth saying there haven’t yet been reports about a lack on grit anywhere.
Cathy Newman’s verdict
The 250,000 tonnes of salt on order are only emergency supplies if councils run out of their own stock. But because winter has started so early and with such ferocity, local authorities are already concerned that they may face salt shortages.
The Winter Resilience Review was quite clear: the majority of the government’s salt reserves should be here by November at the latest. That hasn’t happened – and the stocks won’t be here in total until January. It’s hard to see how exactly that’s “perfectly satisfactory”.
