It's snow joke

But at least the Midcounties Co-operative was coping as well as could be expected. Staff came in at 5am and deliveries, true to the word of group general manager Andy Cresswell, did arrive, even if late, The trouble was that customers took police advice to stay at home “unless their journey was really necessary.”

They left their cars in the snow outside their houses and, instead of driving to the nearest out-of-town supermarket, walked to their local shops — and bought up nearly everything edible or drinkable in sight.

Iain Nicholson of the Oxfordshire Town Chamber of Commerce, which has 1,600 members across Oxfordshire, said : “It is impossible to put anything like a sensible figure on the cost to Oxfordshire business. Clearly there is significant disruption, working days lost and therefore damage to trade.

“But there are also offsetting factors. A lot of people now work from home, and having advance warning meant that more have been able to plan ahead and do so.

“There will also be businesses that benefit. Local shops report people use them who would normally have travelled further afield, and there are of course suppliers of products and services that are more in demand in this kind of weather.”

But what should people do about getting to work on snow days? Obviously getting to work counts as an essential journey for people in frontline services such as health services, but is that true for people in the private sector who simply contribute to keeping the merry-go-round of economic activity moving? Should they risk accidents by getting themselves to work?

Managers at BMW’s Cowley plant, the county’s largest private employer, evidently think not. The plant was closed all day on Wednesday last week with both shifts cancelled while the Thursday early shift was also scrapped. Under the company’s working time account scheme workers will have to make up time lost through snow days.

BMW spokesman Rebecca Baxter said: “The hours will be put into the working time account.

“Everyone is paid their monthly wage and they make the time up later.”

Then there is the question of companies refusing to pay staff members who cannot turn up for work because of snow or the fact they may have to care for children who otherwise would have been at school.

Employment lawyer Richard White of Oxford law firm Withy King, said: “In principle when an employer says they are going to close then people are entitled to be paid or face the potential of an unlawful deduction of salary claim but there can be exceptions.

“It does seem unfair if people are told they must not come into work and potentially they lose out if they are willing and able to get into the workplace.”

But overall, Mr Nicholson says that in many cases there is reason to hope that if a business loses trade in the short term because of snow preventing staff coming into work, the trade may very possibly be made up later.

In December, for instance, a month when retail sales are admittedly skewed by Christmas, figures released this week from the British Retail Consortium show that although spending in the High Street nose-dived due to bad weather early in the month, they more than picked up later.

Overall sales were up six per cent for the month over December last year — itself a poor month, when sales were down 1.4 per cent compared to 2007.

The same applies at non-retail businesses too. Chairman of Oxford United Football Club, Kelvin Thomas, for instance has seen a loss of gate-revenue with four out of the last five matches cancelled.

But he told The Oxford Times that the backlog could be made up when the matches were eventually played. He added that the potential cash flow problem was manageable while the quarterly £120,000 rent payable for the Kassam Staduium had been paid to stadium owner Firoz Kassam at Christmas.

Mr Nicholson said common sense should obviouly rule each individual when deciding whether or not to brave snow and go to work. But even when staff decided to stay at home there were winners as well as losers.

He said: “One trader in Thame has told me of couples coming to his shop precisely because they had taken the day off work.They were people who would not have spent money there otherwise on that day!”

However he said: “Some people definitely stayed away from towns because they were frightened by the state of the pavements. We need a definitive answer about whether or not traders risk being sued if they sweep the pavements in front of their premises in the event of someone being injured. And members have told me we need that ruling before the next cold snap.”

At present, according to a ruling by Lord Davies of Oldham five years ago, it seems that a pavement is definitely the responsibility of the local council — unless it can be argued that a private individual has made matters worse, for instance by sweeping it.

He said, according to a report in The Financial Times: “If [snow clearing] is done in a less than a complete manner and leaves ice, which is more dangerous than snow, it may not necessarily be the local authority but the householder [or presumably the storekeeper] for having dealt with the pavement.”

All this is in stark contrast to many other countries where residents and businesses are required by law to clear the pavements in front of premises, and risk prosecution if they fail to do so and someone is injured.

Looking back to the last genuinely big freeze in 1963, the impression was that people seemed to cope better with the harsh conditions.

But then most lived comparatively near their places of employment. With extended travel to work, today a little snow can go a long way to creating chaos.