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Resilience is the industry’s new watchword, Logistics UK President tells House of Lords
Leigh Pomlett, President of Logistics UK, told a House of Lords committee that the word ‘resilience’ had come to epitomise the logistics industry, following the extremely challenging conditions and economic fallout it has experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Giving evidence yesterday (24 March 2021) to the House of Lords Risk Assessment and Risk Planning Committee, Pomlett joined a panel of senior people from other business groups and the finance sector, to provide the logistics sector’s perspective on how it handles the issue of risk.
“In the supply chain industry, the COVID pandemic has given us a shock that we could never have envisaged since World War II,” he said, “it’s been a bigger shock to our industry than I can ever recall.”
Citing the example of ventilator distribution, where the industry had to compress time from years into weeks, and the vaccine rollout, which he described as the biggest logistics operation the world has ever seen, Pomlett said the industry had faced and risen to an extraordinary set of unprecedented challenges.
“The word resilience has come to the top of the vocabulary of logisticians,” he told the Lords, “just-in-time and lean logistics has gone backwards in terms of its importance.”
Arguing that business has little or no visibility of what the government does in terms of risk management, Pomlett said that industry has templates and methods for managing risk, which he suggested are probably just as useful for government officials as they are for industry leaders.
Concluding the committee session Pomlett called on government to ensure the logistics sector is part of all proactive and reactive high-level resilience planning meetings.
*www.logistics.org.uk/coronavirus
Published On: 25/03/2021 17:00:54
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