Those old bad habits won't be licked while costs are simply passed on to mail customers
Those old bad habits won’t be licked while costs are simply passed on to mail customers
From The Daily Telegraph June 20th, 2001
Section: City
Sub-Section:City Comment
IF your promised love letter failed to arrive this morning, don’t pawn the engagement ring just yet. It’s probably just lost in the post, along with nearly a million other bits of paper entrusted every day to our postal monopoly, and never seen again. You might use the time you could have spent reading your mail to consider the plight of poor beleaguered Consignia, which has been prevented from applying the usual remedy to its problems, that of raising the price of a stamp. Poor old Post Office. No sooner had it acquired a shiny new licence, a silly name, and a list of performance targets as long as your postman’s list of strike days, than it decided it deserved more money as well. A penny on the price of both second and first class stamps brings in an extra pounds 150m a year from the captive public, and the company has been invited to go away and find some cost efficiencies instead. Faced with the threat of rejection by the new postal regulator, Consignia has “suspended” its stamp price application. In order to win approval from PostComm for a price rise, Consignia must prove that without the extra money, the service to consumers will suffer. Its case looks as feeble as usual. For years, the Post Office kept telling us how wonderful it was, and how high the chances were of a letter getting through the next day. Nobody believed this, and outside tests showed the PO claims up as fiction, but now things seem to be getting worse.
Even Consignia’s own figures for first class delivery in 2000-01 are expected to be the worst for four years. One reason is the increasing enthusiasm of postal workers to strike at the merest hint of management attempts to improve efficiency. They do so safe in the knowledge that their employer can always pass on the costs to the customers who must pay up or find another way to communicate. The good news is that the new regime means the end of the indefensible rule that obliges competitors to charge at least pounds 1 to deliver a letter. Now newcomers merely need a licence from PostComm, and the less efficient Consignia is, the more others will reckon they can beat it to the post. Meanwhile, the first class stamp will stay at 27p until the end of the year, when the posties will doubtless be back asking again. Unless they can show that the money will not follow previous rises, and be spent propping up the old bad habits, the regulator’s answer should be the same.
