Royal Mail to be privatised or sold, government says

scott_lithgows

First thing to go will be Saturday deliveries so it,s not all bad news!
That removes just short of 20% RM wage bill but it likes to award senior managers telephone number wages and bonus,s.

They also like to buy trains which rot in the sidings,eastern europe parcel companies which they sell at a loss.

They never payed their share of the pension scheme for 15 years whilst the workers did leading to the shortfall.

They gave £500m each year to the last tory government instead of investing in new technology.

Another British company sold abroad,whoever our new masters are,unless they have rust proof robots to deliver the mail they are buying themselves trouble unless they sack every manager in the place and put their own men in.

custardy

WestonDave wrote: »

The whole thing is inefficient and unnecessary in its current form. We don't need a daily postal delivery, but as a nation we are paying for posties to plough up and down garden paths to deliver junk mail on the cheap. Fewer people are posting things and as a result the service is costing more per item being delivered and at the same time local post offices are going out of business due to lack of business.
you dont need a daily delivery,many do. under your system only the well off will have that service?
its a bit late to push for the PO's to have other uses.many people are miles from their nearest PO's and the idea they could hold mail for all the people in their local area is laughable.so you would need to get new premises to hold all this mail. so in real terms all the mail that now goes to delivery offices would just be retained there?
I'd suggest a wholesale shakeup. Scrap the daily delivery, and make local sub post offices into local mail hubs. Mail for the surrounding area gets delivered there each day, and twice a week (Mon to Sat - so 3 rounds running) mail gets collected from there and delivered. If people want their mail daily then they can pay for a mail box in the post office from where they can collect it. First and second class distinction scrapped to make one standard class. Anything more urgent goes via a special delivery service which is van delivered like parcels are now where one van can cover a vast area. Scrap unaddressed junk mail to make room for mail only in the posties round bags.
they wont remove the delivery service as a whole.infact for the near future i see them retaining the USO. why would you berate RM's present situation then talk about removing unaddressed junk mail when its a growing market? cant have your cake and eat it.if you want self sufficient then that comes with it!


You could then lose 60% of posties, give sub post offices a role and a source of income that would help them stay alive, and in the process cut costs to a point where it remains economic to run a postal system with a stamp price people are prepared to pay.

nice that you wipe out 60% of a work force so easily. now i know its a bit socialist but where do those 60% go to work?

The current system is so labour intensive that with volumes of proper letters declining, the stamp price will have to rise excessively to cover wage costs. With it heavily unionised the chances of keeping wage costs under control are slim so at some point the current system will implode under its own inefficiency.
dont believe all the hype on falling mail volumes. RM are not averse to tweaking figures (and with many desperate to privitise it suits their purposes) also the growth in packets is a year on year rise

you talk about separate vans doing packets
that model is being phased out and has been in many offices
the foot deliveries are now merged with the van duties
some offices have foot deliveries as long as 5 hours and RM are looking to extend this. just because you dont see the benefits for your own situation.dont assume it doesnt suit others

WestonDave

Whether people like it or not a USO of daily deliveries is unsustainable. No-one has the nerve politically to say it yet but the current system is clearly on the verge of collapse.

Postal workers don't like the current situation as they feel that workloads are impractical. The only solution to that is to employ more postal workers to deal with the same volumes of mail - that can't happen within the current postage rates.

Cost and environmental pressures are already reducing the amount of addressed mail - I haven't had an electricity or phone bill for years, and the 4 gas bills a year is hardly keeping Royal Mail in business. If stamp prices rise as a result of the above then it will fall further - its notable that this year although there was a rise in the price of stamps, franked mail didn't increase in price. Think about why that is - because Royal Mail is already scared of pricing off more of the business mail - it can't make a price increase stick.

The defence of "junk" mail is almost laughable in the same context as insisting we need a daily delivery - that stuff has to be booked weeks in advance, and gets delivered when Royal Mail has a slot to carry it, at a fraction of the price they would get for carrying a similar weight of stamped letters. If costs are fixed because you have to have a postie slogging round that round everyday, then its better to get paid 1p for every house on that round than nothing - that's why its popular with businesses - its dirt cheap. Current prices for unaddressed mail delivered are £59.00 per thousand items - that's 6p per item maximum (the rate decreases if you deliver more) compared to a minimum price of 32p per "real" item. There's no protection on those 6p rates so in theory Royal Mail could push them up but they know that's all the service is worth to businesses, and its comparable with pay per click google advertising so before long you can see where that business is going to go! Its certainly not going to get more profitable. If you cut the costs by 60% then you could afford to focus on the 32p+ mail in the available bag space, and the 6p or less would get squeezed out.

Then think about how many items of post you've received this month that you really needed to get that day, rather than two days later. Its probably so few that in those few cases it would be worth them having been paid premium rates for faster delivery. If the van model has gone it can be reinstated - after all we'd be shaking everything else up!

The local post offices thing is probably impractical but in reality most people would probably survive on twice weekly deliveries, certainly in 10 years time which would be the timescale needed for this sort of reorganisation.

25 years ago nearly everyone had their milk delivered to their door by a chap on a funny electric cart. If you'd said then that daily milk deliveries would be scrapped you'd have had the same reaction as we're seeing to significant change to Royal Mail. Just as supermarkets overtook the need for lots of humans doing hard labour delivering milk, electronic communication will in time leave post to the same sort of status - sending birthday cards etc, and we'll just get used to sending it a week before rather than a day before. I'm not particularly wanting to put a load of people out of work, but the notion we can keep on employing people to trudge round the streets delivering stuff that less and less people actually want is clearly unsustainable.

zappahey

bendix wrote: »

Quite right too. It's the only sensible option. Its hopelessly inefficient compared to much better models like Belgian Poste

As a customer of that particular organisation, I can tell you that that the efficiency does not run as far as customer service or speedy delivery.

Can you point me towards some information on this efficiency? I'm genuinely interested, rather than challenging your point.

olly300

WestonDave wrote: »

Then think about how many items of post you've received this month that you really needed to get that day, rather than two days later. Its probably so few that in those few cases it would be worth them having been paid premium rates for faster delivery. If the van model has gone it can be reinstated - after all we'd be shaking everything else up!

Quite a lot actually

WestonDave wrote: »

The local post offices thing is probably impractical but in reality most people would probably survive on twice weekly deliveries, certainly in 10 years time which would be the timescale needed for this sort of reorganisation.

Again another presumption that everyone follows the same life model as you.

While I do things online and have a fax machine lots of organisations will only reply to you via the post.

WestonDave wrote: »

25 years ago nearly everyone had their milk delivered to their door by a chap on a funny electric cart. If you'd said then that daily milk deliveries would be scrapped you'd have had the same reaction as we're seeing to significant change to Royal Mail.

There are still 2 milk men around here.

Plus there are actually more doorstep deliveries than 25 years ago here. I know lots of people who now get their veg delivered weekly to their doorstep plus their supermarket shopping.

LydiaJ

olly300 wrote: »

Quite a lot actually


Again another presumption that everyone follows the same life model as you.

While I do things online and have a fax machine lots of organisations will only reply to you via the post.


There are still 2 milk men around here.

Plus there are actually more doorstep deliveries than 25 years ago here. I know lots of people who now get their veg delivered weekly to their doorstep plus their supermarket shopping.

But those deliveries aren't daily, are they? Whereas milk was.

Daily milk deliveries made sense decades ago before fridges were commonplace. Practically no households need milk delivered daily now, and indeed a lot of the remaining milk delivery services only come three times a week.

It's true that I get a lot fewer letters than 10 years ago, and most of them are not very urgent. I post even fewer letters. I get a lot more parcels, though, because 10 years ago I bought things in shops rather than online. While of course we're not all the same, I think that the trend of those changes is general to society rather than specific to me.

Lotus-eater

But as said before, but ignored by most people, the package numbers are going up, we are all buying more online and alot of that gets sent via RM.
So why aren't RM making money? Is it probably because it's a dinosaur of a company which can't do anything without the unions blowing up and is it because it has government legisation hanging round it's neck, which means it can't compete with the private companies?

Is it going to be a success like the railway privitisation? So if I want to send a letter to Scotland I have to buy 5 different companies stamps.

The unions and some of the management, don't live in the same real modern world, that most of the rest of us do and although I feel sorry for those who will lose their jobs, the only way through this is to privatise it. What are the alternatives? Taking on the unions and modernising the PO anyway? Huge strikes and half the country doesn't get it's ebay purchases for months and it will just be making it worse for the PO, losing business and money.

BLT_2

marklv wrote: »

Loads of people still post letters, you arrogant lawyer p-r-i-c-k.

Privatising RM will mean mail being delivered less frequently (i.e. twice a week probably if you are a residential address), more mail being lost or stolen and higher delivery prices.

In fairness, private delivery services work very well in the US, but only because the infrastructure has been around for ages and the companies can make economies of scale when in such a huge market. In the UK they will struggle to deliver at competitive prices.

I don't think it will impact much on many of us. Pretty much everything is done online these days. I do get lots of junk mail through the post, maybe this would reduce if it became pricier to send.

I can not think of a single thing, apart from a few ebay packages, where the post actually impinges on my life.

Even birthday cards are emailed these days

ultrawomble

Lotus-eater wrote: »

So why aren't RM making money?

Because they have to subsidise private carriers through downstream access? Those private carriers who don't have to provide a universal service.

LydiaJ

What would happen if they removed the RM monopoly, but made it so that no carrier, courier or any other company could be licensed to operate unless they provided universal service for the whole of the UK (including any islands etc that are covered by RM) at a flat rate? I don't just mean that they have to deliver to anywhere in the UK, but that nobody in the UK should be more than x miles from a place where you can post things and the company will collect it reasonably often. Suppose it included parcels etc - anything and everything up to, say, 10kg.

I think RM might be much better able to compete if the playing field was level.