Regulator licenses Deya to beat postal strikes
THE POSTAL regulator Postcomm has licensed a private company to deliver essential mail in the event that postal workers go on strike.
This is the first time the regulator has given the go-ahead for a rival operator to deliver letters specifically in the event of industrial action at the Royal Mail.
But it is a move Postcomm’s chairman, Graham Corbett, has been threatening to take in light of the appalling strike record of the Royal Mail which was responsible for a third of all days lost due to industrial action in the UK last year.
Deya, a Wokingham-based distributor of bulk mail, has been licensed to provide a UK-wide postal service for local authorities and utility companies. This will enable it to deliver housing benefit payments, council tax demands and water, gas, electricity and telephone bills if there is disruption to the nationwide postal service.
The licence will take effect next April and will run for an initial period of 12 months. Deya is a privately owned company with a full-time workforce of about 40 and turnover of pounds 8m a year. It specialises in delivering telephone directories and Yellow Pages on behalf of British Telecom through a network of 50,000 self-employed contractors. It handles about 20 million items a year.
Separately, Postcomm has issued a short-term licence to Business Post to provide mail services for its business customers in large cities such as London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Edinburgh.
The Business Post subsidiary UK Mail will be allowed to collect and sort letters and then transport them to local Royal Mail offices which will then deliver them to each address.
