Dear John Hutton,
How long can this keep going on for? What exactly are you trying to achieve? The Post Office has already been cut to pieces and now the mail regulator Postcomm is suggesting that we shouldn’t get post on Saturdays and that first-class deliveries don’t have to arrive the next day? No doubt you are desperate to find any way to save the government a bit of cash, regardless of the consequences.
With the average delivery time already falling and the end of twice-a-day deliveries and post boxes being emptied on Sundays, the postal service in this country has slipped far enough. Businesses are suffering in what are tough economic conditions without you pushing them deeper in trouble, and the elderly will also be hit by such unhelpful changes. The insistence on a single price for deliveries, regardless of where people live, is also digging Royal Mail in a deeper hole. Now that the postal service has been opened up to competition, cutbacks in the Post Office will result in businesses moving over to rival operators, the Post Office losing even more money, leading to more cutbacks in services, leading to more businesses moving to rival operators… you see where I’m coming from here?
The solution is obvious - get the government’s hands off Royal Mail and open up our postal service to full competition in terms of collection and delivery. Clinging to the relic of the postal network from years gone by only postpones the inevitable. The Post Office cannot survive in its current form or anything remotely similar to its current form and it’s about time you realised that.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
8 responses so far ↓
Harry Hook // May 10, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Perhaps nows the time to consider renaming your blog …Emails From A Tory
MLH // May 10, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Yeah, because privatizing the post office will work, just like it did with all those former nationalised companies…
Letters From A Tory // May 11, 2008 at 8:32 am
Who said anything about privatisation? You can very conceivably have a state-owned postal network with private companies competing for customers, which is certainly not ‘privatisation’.
I’d also like to say that I really hate people saying ‘privatisation doesn’t work, look at what happened in the past’. Of course things like rail privatisation were completely botched, but that doesn’t mean involving private companies can’t improve the situation. After all, Deutsche Post in Germany does a very good job of running the efficient postal system and is a private company.
beachhutman // May 11, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Yeah, Deutsche post like now balances its books with a massive operation supporting fraud and scam mailings - rather like out own Royal Mail tries top do in association with Spring in the Netherlands. It is not only “competition” that has done for the UK PO of course, it is mainly the EU. Almost without exception, the big changes that have so damaged the UK service have been EU based on EU requirements.
Letters From A Tory // May 12, 2008 at 10:20 am
Obviously the EU competition rules have had a massive bearing on the Post Office, but being forced to introduce competition is very different from restructuring the Post Office network.
And where are the references for the criticisms of Deutsche Post? Their postal service is a hell of a lot more advanced and efficient than ours.
batman // May 13, 2008 at 10:50 am
How do you think that introducing more competition will prevent a further reduction in services, for example Saturday deliveries, the service with which you began your post?
Letters From A Tory // May 13, 2008 at 11:14 am
It’s all about incentives.
If you say to a private company ‘here is a large pot of cash, run this service for us’ (e.g. PFI) they will screw you for every penny and provide a poor service because their incentive is to drive down costs. However, if you set up a system where the money is made by attracting customers (either by providing a quality service or possibly by offering additional services such as Saturday and Sunday deliveries) within a competitive market, everyone wins. It all comes down to where the incentives lie.
Bill Quango MP // May 15, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Remember POST OFFICES are PRIVATELY owned already. Post Office ltd does mostly not pay for 12,000 buildings, staff, staff NI contributions , pensions, council tax, business rates, waste costs, fuel, heat, electricity , lighting bills.
They don’t face sickness costs, maternity costs, only very very limited holiday costs.
Minimum wage increases don’t really trouble them and leases, legal costs on buildings , buildings and contents insurances, limited liability insurance etc etc is born by the appointed Subpostmaster/mistress.
How would ‘privatisation’ help. They are already private. Plus wouldn’t this completely destroy the social service provided? Who would want to fund that? It makes only a tiny profit.
Royal Mail is the big loss maker, and its the pensions that are the biggest contributer to that.
Deutche Post.. no competition remember. Lets see how well they do when La Poste is picking off the best business. Mail deregulation.. what a farce its been. To standardise prices across
the EU its dismantled 100 years of service in each country.
State TV, surely that should be on the agenda, for the same reasons.. And will bring very similar problems.
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