Councils making plans to beat Brexit chaos
GREATER Manchester is drawing up its own emergency response to a ‘no deal’ Brexit amid fears over a sudden shortage of medicines and other key resources.
Public bodies locally have begun discussing how they will cope if Britain crashes out of the EU next March without any formal arrangements with Brussels.
Asked on Friday when the region should start preparing for such an event, Manchester council’s leader Sir Richard Leese said: “I think the answer to that is now.”
It is understood that since then public authorities across the conurbation’s ten authorities have already started drawing up plans.
At the weekend, it emerged ministers are preparing to put the army on standby to deliver food, medicine and fuel in the event of shortages should no deal be struck with Europe, while government has reportedly also scrapped plans to provide weekly public updates on such a scenario due to fears they will panic Conservative voters.
According to the Sunday Times, helicopters and army trucks would be used to take medicines to vulnerable people in remote communities. Hospitals would also begin to stockpile drugs.
A minister told the paper that the military would be brought in if blockages at the country’s ports led to a disruption to the supply of food or fuel, describing the plans as ‘utterly realistic.’ At Greater Manchester level, leaders now believe local plans are also required.
On Friday, the region’s chief health officer John Rouse - a former Department of Health official - asked Sir Richard, who leads on the economy for the region’s combined authority, about the issue.
“When do you think we need to be initiating emergency planning, resilience, response arrangements to prepare for the possibility of a no deal at a Greater Manchester level?” he asked at the authority’s latest meeting.
Sir Richard replied: “I think the answer to that is now. Government is already doing that and I think we need to be doing that.”
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham said more details would be brought back to the region’s September meeting.
“I understand the health service is already beginning to think about this, as rightly they should be, as we get closer to that possibility,” he said. “It needs perhaps to be an exercise that all Greater Manchester public bodies need to start thinking about - and we will bring back some more considered advice on that in September.”
Sources said those plans are now already in motion. It is understood most of the NHS’s planning for a no-deal scenario in eight months’ time is being carried out at a national level, with a focus on both the short-term and the longterm.
Initially, the concerns focus on immediately safeguarding supplies of medicine, medical devices and specialist equipment, some of which only have a short shelf-life.
More widely, plans are being drawn up to tackle any potential workforce shortages and another economic crash, which could create a rise in poor health and more pressure on the NHS.
REMEMBER the countdown to the Millennium? When we were all chillingly warned that the end was nigh with computers all over the world shutting down and planes dropping out of the sky.
Remember how none of that materialised? And recall how most of us didn’t believe the doom mongers anyway?
I believe that the same healthy scepticism will meet the plans apparently afoot in No 10 to scare us witless over Brexit.
The Europhiles still can’t get their heads round the fact that the majority voted to leave, nor that it was democracy in action which must be respected.
With the failure of the first round of Project Fear, preparations for us leaving the EU without a deal are being weaponised as part of Project Fear 2.0.
We are told to take comfort from the fact that there are contingency plans to stockpile food and medicine. Not designed to scare us at all!
Bizarre tales have already emerged about no more sandwiches; dairy products becoming expensive luxuries; planes being grounded and a supergonorrhoea epidemic.
But I believe the British people are very level-headed and will see through such blatant scare tactics to make us think that Theresa May’s ’soft’ Brexit proposal is the way forward.
In fact the more the Remainers try to intimidate folk, the more it will backfire and harden the resolve of Brexiteers to leave, deal or no deal. Paul Nuttall, North West MEP, UK Independence Party