From coffee to microchips – how the supply chain crisis is disrupting UK plc

Experts say worker shortages are at the heart of the UK’s problems, causing issues to bubble up across the economy; from McDonald’s milkshake deficit to builders rationing cement and plasterboard

Fruit has been left to rot on farms, slaughterhouses are struggling to process pigs and chickens, and milk deliveries are delayed. Industry leaders say the problems stem from a lack of workers to pick, process and transport goods, rather than insufficient volumes of food. File picture: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

Fast food chains are running out of chicken. Hauliers’ wage bills are going through the roof. Crops are rotting in the fields. The scale of Britain’s supply chain meltdown is the worst since the 1970s, when the three-day week, power cuts and industrial disputes saw rubbish pile up in the streets.

Fast forward four decades and the shortages in modern Britain stem from Covid-19 disrupting an intricate network of global supply chains where the slightest problem throws the whole system. Brexit has added to the rebooted anarchy in the UK, with years of chronic underinvestment in people and infrastructure, both from government and business, painfully exposed.