Ministers’ delay on deliveries hits sick and OAPs
VULNERABLE Scots have been unable to access a supermarket priority delivery service helping hundreds of thousands in England.
A delay in handing data to major retailers by Holyrood ministers has meant elderly or sick people without friends or relatives have not been able to obtain food amid enormous demand for supermarket deliveries.
Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs launched a scheme to help supermarkets identify those who are ‘clinically vulnerable and isolated’ in England last Thursday.
But Scottish Government
‘SNP must be quicker’
officials say a similar move north of the Border is still being finalised.
Scottish Tory deputy leader Annie Wells said: ‘When successful projects are launched down south, the SNP must be quicker in learning from them and replicating them.’
Meanwhile, supermarket chains Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose have been contacting elderly customers identified through their own shop schemes around the UK.
However, Christel Law, 76, from Edinburgh, said: ‘I tried to get a priority delivery slot at Waitrose, which they indicate on their website.
‘This website then referred me to a government website which asked me to say whether I am English, Scottish, or Irish. On clicking Scottish I was told that Scotland was not participating in this scheme.’
A Waitrose spokesman insisted it was offering priority slots to Scottish customers. He said: ‘We’re sorry for any confusion on our website, this was certainly not intended and we have updated the website to reflect this.’
Sainsbury’s said it had preempted government priority schemes and was the UK’s first supermarket to offer delivery slots for elderly customers, using its own data to contact those believed eligible.
A spokesman said: ‘We’re working with government to prioritise the nation’s most vulnerable customers for online delivery slots.’
An ASDA spokesman said it was waiting for government data but would carry out priority deliveries.
Tesco said it had used UK Government data to identify ‘clinically vulnerable and isolated’ customers south of the Border but was still waiting for data from Holyrood.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘We are arranging to share data from our high clinical risk group with the supermarkets, and detailed work is under way to implement the necessary arrangements to allow them to prioritise their delivery slots.’