A meeting of emergency services and business leaders has heard that 38% of businesses have no clear arrangements for dealing with a swine flu pandemic, despite infection rates reaching almost epidemic proportions in London and the West Midlands.

Transport for London didn’t envisage a reduced underground service causing problems since there would be fewer commuters. However, Lyndon Bird, who is international technical director of the Business Continuity Institute, was sceptical of this outcome and with potentially hundreds of thousands having to work from home, British Telecom has also not been able to guarantee that the broadband network would be able to cope with the greatly increased demand.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk