CWU Gen Sec chastises a postal regulator bent on delivering Royal Mail workers' labour into the hands of the private sector

THE Post Office is a monopoly. It is strange that recent conditioning means
that I almost feel apologetic about this disgraceful state of affairs. I feel as if I should add: "I'm sorry about this. Naturally, I will do
everything I can to end it. I know that monopolies are bad." But the truth is that I don't feel that way at all. I don't even feel that
there should be a debate about it. A postal monopoly is not good, bad or indifferent, it is a fact – like the fact
that there is only one Monopolies Commission. No other organisation could begin to compete with Royal Mail in any serious way. The fact that it has remained unchallenged as the nation's mail carrier for 350
years is not because no-one else has been interested in the business or that
noone has noticed that there is a postal service. No-one has tried to enter the market because there is no room for two parallel
enterprises moving mail across the country. The organisation is too vast. The sorting machinery is too expensive and
specialised. The number of staff is too huge. These are not costs that can be adjusted if a company is only handling a small
amount of mail. They are fixed costs and only an enterprise as big as the Royal Mail is
equipped to deal with them. No other organisation is going to bid to deliver to each and every one of the
27 million British addresses, six days a week at the same price as Royal Mail
has been doing since 1840. In fact, if any other organisation does decide to compete on a nationwide
basis, it could only succeed by driving the Royal Mail into bankruptcy –
replacing it as the monopoly postal service. Despite this, the government established a postal regulator last year with a
remit that includes introduction of competition into the service. Under the legislation, this is only a part of the regulator's job. However, PostComm sees introduction of competition as its major occupation and
brings an almost evangelical zeal to the task. . It has decided that, if it fails to introduce competition, it has failed. So, we have a regulator desperate to introduce competition. But what part of
the service can PostComm open to the private sector? The central part of the postal network – the work of moving mail across the
country – is run by the Royal Mail. No other organisation currently has the capacity to do this work and no other
organisation would risk the investment needed to create a parallel system. So, this central part of the operation will remain a monopoly. PostComm must look elsewhere to give private competitors a chance to pick up
some ill-gotten gains. Private firms can only be introduced at the local level – after the Royal Mail
has collected mail from post boxes or post offices, sorted it, transported it
and delivered it to another part of the country. If the regulator has its way, the vultures will be standing at the end of the
station ready to seize the mail and pop it around the corner, thus earning
themselves a healthy profit. This is what PostComm considers fair competition on a level playing field. To me, it looks like an arrangement whereby Royal Mail does the work and some
speculator picks up the money. Last month, the regulator issued a provisional licence to distribution
organisation Hays to deliver mail in three carefully selected cities. This made PostComm feel good. It had taken a step to introduce competition. But, in reality, it clearly hadn't. Why? Because Hays doesn't want
to compete with the Royal Mail. It wants to pick up mail within a city and take it somewhere else in the same
city. It wants to take the work that is easy and charge a high price for it. It has no intention of offering a national delivery service. So, this isn't competition at all. It is easy to move mail across a
few streets. It happens in London all the time, usually through unorganised bike delivery
companies. They offer a mail service that arrives more than twice a day – which is what
the Royal Mail offers. If PostComm is serious about insisting on a better service for customers, it
would tell the Royal Mail to offer more deliveries. This could revitalise the service, create more full-time permanent jobs and
boost the whole mail operation. But PostComm doesn't want this. Why? Because its real concern is not to insist on a first-class mail service,
although I believe that this should be its primary task and the government
indicated that it wanted such a service when PostComm was set up. The covert task of PostComm is simpler – take public services and, by whatever
unfair methods that it can invent, transfer those jobs into the private
sector. This is what regulation's secret agenda is all about. "To regulate" has a number of definitions. One definition is "to adjust something so that it works correctly, " while
another is "to reduce a group to order." British regulation 2001-style is concerned with the latter. And the group to be brought to order is the public sector. Our union saw exactly the same thing happen when BT
was privatised. The model followed then continues to be the model followed today, even though
the government has changed. The model works like this. First, cut off investment in a public service. BT desperately needed investment to keep up with new technologies. The Thatcher government would not al
low it and so, inevitably, the phone
service deteriorated. It took people months to get a new line and weeks to have their existing one
fixed. Discontent grew and complaints multiplied. Thatcher was delighted. The
conditions were in place to privatise the industry. The next step was to bring in a regulator who would do the government's bidding
and offer outside firms the opportunity to make money. The first firm to enter this distorted artificial "market" was Mercury. The regulator insisted that BT allowed the company to use all BT infrastructure
in order to provide services in competition to BT. It sounds ludicrous and it was ludicrous. But this is exactly the same blueprint that has been dusted down for postal
services. Speculators will be invited to use the Royal Mail network to cream off a few
lucrative operations at the end of the process. This isn't competing. This is a case of being offered a chance to make money
because of a political decision that the public services should be run down to
provide entry for private firms. The important question is whether this is a rogue regulator or a regulator
carrying out government policy. If it is the former, the government can redefine what it wants from the postal
regulator. This can be solved almost immediately. If it is the latter, it is a clear case of the government wanting private funds
in public services and that strategy will not go away. It will become a central part of the issue that will dominate relations
between the unions and the Labour government for the foreseeable future.
PAGE: 7
SECTION: Features
MORNING STAR, 07th August 2001