He does know how to get food on shelves….
Lewis’s experience means he knows supply and demand, which can be scaled up to a national level, explains Tom Reddy who has driven lorries across Europe for 15 years.
To understand demand – what needs to go on the shelves of a supermarket or what is needed to feed a nation – bosses can look at the data for the previous years to see buying habits.
“Dave Lewis saw Tesco through the early stages of the pandemic – and the supermarkets adapted so unbelievably well to the change in demand through the pandemic,” he explains.
“It gives me hope for the first time that someone is actually going to make some real changes and offer some real advice. Whether or not they listen to him is another question.”
Support The Big IssueGive your local vendor a hand up and buy the magazine
Each of our vendors buy their copies of the mag for £1.50 each, selling them for £3 and keeping the difference. Visit our interactive map to find your nearest vendor.
With the UK short of 100,000 HGV drivers, the government has confirmed plans to speed up the process of obtaining an HGV driver licence. However for Reddy, this will make very little difference to the conditions drivers have to put up with that drives many to leave the industry.
“I think what’s going to happen is they’ll throw a load of people through the tests, and they’re going to do a few months in the job and realise what a nightmare of a job it is, and then they’re going to leave,” he said.
What we need, Reddy believes, is a societal-wide attitude change that starts to value vocational careers that don’t require a university degree – such as HGV driving or working in a supermarket, so that people are attracted to those careers and stay in them.
“Dave Lewis will understand that, but Mr Johnson and Mr Shapps won’t because they’ve never had a real job in their life,” he said.
But the problems run deeper than stock management and simply hiring more staff
The problems causing the UK’s empty shelves cannot be solved by any amount of better management explains supply-chain researcher and LSE academic Nikhil Datta.
“Managing the economy, managing the entire retail sector and entire food sector is going to be fundamentally different from managing a business,” Datta said.
Brexit has introduced a barrage of regulatory barriers, customs and procedures that mean what would previously have been frictionless trade, is now, well, tricky.
Getting goods and products over the border and into the UK now requires checks and paperwork that are not only financially costly, but also take time, and added to by a shortage of HGV drivers to physically bring goods to the UK, are causing massive delays.
Furthermore, unlike a supermarket, the UK is no longer free to hire as many, or few, workers as it desires, after free immigration ended with Brexit.
Subscribe to The Big IssueFrom just £3 per week
Take a print or digital subscription to The Big Issue and provide a critical lifeline to our work. With each subscription we invest every penny back into supporting the network of sellers across the UK.
A subscription also means you'll never miss the weekly editions of an award-winning publication, with each issue featuring the leading voices on life, culture, politics and social activism.
“If I’m in an EU country at the moment, I can essentially hire from any other EU country. That’s not really possible in the UK anymore, there are limits, to an extent, which means that if there are shortages in certain areas of employment, you can’t necessarily easily fill those gaps with domestic workers,” Datta explained.
The UK is currently facing a labour gap of 1.1 million workers to fill record job vacancies, caused in part by lower migration and younger and older people leaving the labour market.
Datta said what might help is improving relations with the EU before a full-blown trade war erupts.
“If the government really wanted to do something about the supply chain issues, they would start by looking at improving our trading relationship with the European Union,” he said.