Cost of being snow-ready

[Number Six]

We're always told that the reason that place like Canada and Scandinavia cope better with snow that us is that they get it much more regularly, so it's worth them having the infrastructure to cope.

 

This sounds reasonable.

 

And then you read reports like this which suggest that the current snow is costing the UK economy £1.2 billion per day.

 

So I was wondering just how much a snow plough is? The public sector has lots of big vehicles - how much would it really cost to buy a load of ploughs to fit to them? I expect you could get quite a few for the £2.5 billion the last two days of snow have apparently cost the country.

[Boblet]

I can't answer your question, but I would just make a couple of observations

 

A lot of the alleged "cost" is actually spent elsewhere - town centre pubs, shops and restaurants may have suffered but a lot of local ones have had their best Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday takings for longer than they can remember - at least the ones I've been in have!

 

Those who couldn't fly abroad will have spent money in this country that would otherwise have been spent in Spain, Egypt, Cyprus etc

 

A lot of hotels have seen occupancy rates rise

 

I'm not saying that a lot of businesses haven't suffered as a consequence, but I'm always a little suspicious of these statistics that seem to be calculated by someone thinking of a number and quadrupling it

[andyofborg]

Most of the money "lost" is private sector money not public sector money and much of it is spending delayed rather than spending lost, if you cant get to the shops to buy something then you will buy it next week when you can get to the shops rather than not buy it at all!

[alchresearch]

Why don't we do a sharing scheme with someone in the southern hemisphere and borrow their snowploughs and stuff during their summer?