Heavy snowfall caused traffic chaos in London, with Transport for London cancelling all bus services on Monday due to ‘treacherous road conditions’.
A spokeswoman for TfL said crews had worked through Sunday night to grit and snow-plough the capital’s key trunk routes, and all 360 miles of roads it was responsible for were clear.
However, roads leading out of bus depots – which are the responsibility of councils – were not safe, and therefore, buses were unable to leave depots.
Chairman of the Local Government Agency’s environment board, Paul Bettison, said councils had battled ‘around the clock’ to grit roads and footways but ‘other organisations which are affected by the snow appear to be using councils as a scapegoat for their own poor preparations for the weather’.
Westminster City Council had deployed 120 staff and seven gritting machines to help keep central London moving. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, TfL commissioner, Peter Hendy, said: ‘The local authorities deployed everything they had on Sunday night and Monday morning, but it just wasn’t enough.’
Former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, criticised TfL and local authorities for selling off equipment and depots that could deal with high levels of snowfall. But Hendy responded: ‘We have helped them to redistribute supplies of grit.
‘As far as I know, nobody ran out. It is just that the circumstances were quite exceptional.’ Current mayor, Boris Johnson, also criticised TfL’s handling of adverse weather conditions. Johnson said the health and safety bureaucrats had ‘bounced one’ past him by not allowing bus services and other transport networks to run.
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