British business is adapting to crisis

Their response to this crisis shows just how innovative British businesses are.

For example, pubs and restaurants are now doing takeaway meals, which taxi drivers, who now have few other customers, are delivering.

Yesterday I got a box of fresh produce, delivered by a local restaurant. It’s the same produce they’ve always got from their suppliers, but instead of cooking it they are repacking it and delivering it to your door. Local shops are delivering too.

 Within days of the panic buying, supermarkets reserved special times for older people and gave all-day priority to health workers.

They countered hoarding with buying limits. But then stepped up their supplies so quickly that the shelves were re-filled and the limits lifted.

 They marked safe distances on the floor, gave their checkout staff protective screens, and stepped up the cleaning of pin-pads and surfaces.

Such response suggests to me that, when it comes to easing the lockdown, there is no need to impose some detailed Whitehall-style instruction manual on what shops and other businesses can or cannot do. We just need to say what the broad rules are. And within a week, businesses will come up with all sorts of ingenious ways to trade safely that civil servants could never dream up in a decade.