Outlook: Postman private
Outlook: Postman private
From The Independent May 26th, 2001
FROM THE team that brought you this week’s wildcat postal strikes, Royal Mail Lite – a low-cost, no-frills and very definitely non-unionised letter delivery service. The Post Office is thinking of asking the new postal regulator if it can have a licence to operate in competition with itself in areas where its own staff cannot be relied on to get the mail through.
Yes, really. Perhaps if it applies under its new and meaningless name of Consignia the Postal Services Commission will not notice. But no regulator could be that dim.
PostComm is duty bound to consider any licence application, whatever its origin. But it would surely only be a matter of seconds before one from Consignia was torn up and thrown in the bin.
None the less, the mere fact that Consignia is thinking aloud about such an idea, shows what a bind it and the regulator are in.
Both are desperate for a rival operator to come forward with an application to start postal services – Consignia so that it can show its bolshie unions that competition is real and PostComm so that it can justify its existence to the world.
Alas, so far no-one has been prepared to take the plunge, not even the likes of the big boys from FedEx, TNT and Hays. But Graham Corbett, the PostComm chairman, would be delighted to hear from anyone who has a spare Transit van, an A-Z of say Liverpool and a pair of rugged walking shoes. Applications in writing but please don’t risk posting them.
