Government Car and Despatch Agency gets the UK's government through the snow, delivering parcels and people despite extreme weather conditions
4 February 2009
Pictures of empty desks and deserted roads dominated the news on Monday. Yet GCDA, the agency that provides Britain's government with much of its transport, kept three quarters of its award-winning 'green' taxi service on the road throughout the heaviest snowfall that the UK - and particularly the capital - has seen in almost two decades.
Despite the severe weather conditions 75 percent of the staff who drive Government Car and Despatch Agency's car fleet were able to report for work and provide their usual service for their ministers and other government clients.
Like thousands of workers in the worst-affected parts of the country, many clients made their own way home early. All pre-bookings were therefore double-checked so that cars could be diverted to clients who still wanted them.
As a result, anyone who needed a car and who could also tolerate a short delay was able to have one.
GCDA's Government Mail arm, delivering parcels and documents across the UK on behalf of a wide range of government clients, found itself grinding to halt by lunchtime on Monday - the first time in over 14 years that any part of the service has not been able to complete a booked run.
In many cases GCDA vans only became stuck when they arrived at premises where delivery areas had not been cleared or gritted, and in many cases its drivers failed to deliver packages because offices were unstaffed. All work on behalf of Her Majesty's Court Service was delivered with the exception only of those courts which had closed early.
News of the severe weather coming in to Wales and the North, where key GCDA depots are located, prompted a decision to call all the agency's vans off the road and suspend all trunking routes at lunchtime on Monday.
By Tuesday morning, however, despite plummeting temperatures and a hard frost overnight, all government cars services were back to full strength and all but five percent of the Government Mail service was running normally. Only two routes in Wales, where the heaviest snowfalls in the UK had completely blocked major roads, were suspended until further notice.
"We are immensely proud of the way our staff responded to these extraordinary weather conditions," said Roy Burke, Chief Executive of GCDA
