Consignia rethinking plan to charge for early delivery
Consignia is to rethink its controversial plan to charge many customers pounds 14 a week to deliver post before 9am, its chairman said yesterday.
Allan Leighton said the pilot projects for the scheme would now examine the options of charging pounds 5 or pounds 10 a week.
Mr Leighton acknowledged that he had not been briefed on the pounds 14-a-week plan before news of it broke in the media this week.
He added: ‘We are having a rethink because I am trying to put a price increase through on stamps so that I can argue that the first class stamp is the best value you can get in Britain today.
‘And one of the things we have to do for our customers is to deliver some value.
‘And I think that pounds 14 is a lot of money for small businesses.
‘So the point of these pilots is to learn how to do this properly, move to one delivery, and then find a way in which we can cover our costs but at the same time deliver some value.
‘So we are going to move to not just pounds 14 but pounds 5 and pounds 10 and find the lowest cost way in which we can do this.’
Mr Leighton also accepted that Consignia was in dire straits.
‘It is a chronic failure full stop.
You cannot imagine a company which is a monopoly, which has pounds 6 billion of sales, that manages to lose pounds 1.2 million a day.
‘There is a cast of things that have gone wrong over a period of time. The most important thing is it can’t continue because the business will go bust.’
Mr Leighton defended his own part-time status, and the fact that he has a total of nine boardroom jobs.
‘Most chairmen are part-time … but I spend 50 per cent of my time on Consignia,’ he said, adding that he was working to create a strong management team beneath him. He conceded that morale among his workforce was very low.
‘Morale in our business is awful. People have to work in terrible conditions, they are not listened to, the levels of harassment, bullying, racial discrimination will be as high as any company in Britain and all those things are unacceptable, and unpalatable, and we have to change them,’ he said.
The company had to be made more efficient if it was to cope with new competition, he added. ‘The only way we are going to compete is if we change the way in which we do things, because at the moment competition coming in will slice us.’
Meanwhile, pilot schemes abolishing the second post were being introduced in 14 areas around the UK today.
The areas for the scheme include: Crawley, West Sussex; Bow, east London; Edinburgh Dell; Sheringham, Norfolk; East Manchester; Llanelli; Newbury, Berks; Newhaven, East Sussex; Loughborough, Leicestershire, Halifax, West Yorkshire; Plymouth, Devon; Ballymena, Northern Ireland; Thirsk, North Yorkshire and St Helens, Merseyside.
Last year Consignia group recorded pre-tax losses of pounds 1.1 billion and 17,000 jobs are to go over three years as part of a restructuring programme.
