Post managers warn of deliveries 'meltdown'
Postal deliveries face “meltdown” under plans by the postal services regulator to open up the sector to competition, according to a poll of senior managers at Consignia.
The Amicus trade union said that in the poll of 600 managers at Consignia – the new name for the Post Office – almost two-thirds said the company was not capable of meeting the challenges ahead.
“The postal service as we know it faces meltdown if the current plan for competition is implemented too fast,” said Roger Lyons, general secretary of Amicus.
The union, which represents 15,000 postal managers, is seeking talks with Consignia executives and Patricia Hewitt, the trade and industry secretary, to discuss the findings of the survey.
Postcomm, the postal service regulator, provoked controversy last month in announcing plans for outside companies to start competing with Consignia for bulk deliveries to businesses from April. The plans are being studied by Mrs Hewitt’s department, which has ultimate responsibility for the organisation of postal services, but have been criticised by Consignia as bringing about competition in the industry too quickly.
Allan Leighton, chairman of Consignia, is expected to write to Graham Corbett, Postcomm’s chairman, in the next two weeks to outline its objections. Consignia said: “We will make it clear that we accept and welcome competition but at a suitable pace.”
The company says the plans will lead to the most profitable parts of its business being targeted by competitors, and make it difficult for it to offer a universal postal service across the country.
In the survey by Amicus, most of the managers criticised the quality of leadership at the company.
In a further sign of the poor employee morale that has been a problem at Consignia for some time, two-thirds of those polled said the business targets on which their bonus pay was set were not realistic.
Consignia, which is losing Pounds 1m a day, already faces a threat of strikes over pay by the Communication Workers’ Union, the biggest mail union. Labour activists attending the party’s annual Scottish conference yesterday backed an emergency resolution from the union that called on the government to “explicitly reject privatisation of Consignia”.
The little-noticed resolution was carried on a show of hands after John Brown, a CWU delegate, claimed the Post Office was facing “privatisation by stealth”.
But in a rare piece of good news for the company it has announced a deal with Safeway, the retailer, in which Consignia will take over delivery to the company of non-grocery items returned by consumers. www.ft.com/consignia
Financial Times
