Consignia increases charges – and chief executive's pension
Consignia has angered customers by quietly introducing increases of up to 20% in some charges and giving its outgoing chief executive a 30% rise in his annual pension entitlement.
This is a difficult time for the company, which has come under fire for trying to introduce a £14 a week levy on early daily mail deliveries while moving ahead with plans to drop the second delivery.
Consignia justified the moves last night by saying tariff increases on pre-paid envelopes were needed to cover the extra costs of the stationery.
“We have had no increases in seven years and the new tariffs reflect the true cost to us.
“We have been selling at a loss and we need to act commercially,” said a spokeswoman.
But Postwatch, the statutory consumer watchdog, said it should look at other ways of increasing its revenues. “This only shows why we believe that more competition is needed in the market,” it said.
Small businesses said the increase in charges was damaging. “I run a fledgling PR firm and have found pre-paid envelopes to be a useful business tool, so I am particularly annoyed at the size of the increase and the fact that Royal Mail did not bother to warn me about it,” said Andy Loynes, of Pure Marketing Communications, of Bury, Lancashire.
Meanwhile, chief executive John Roberts has seen his pension entitlements rise even though the company is forging ahead with plans for 30,000 redundancies.
The increase, to nearly £150,000, was revealed in its just published annual report and is embarrassing because Mr Roberts had previously made a great show of turning down a 10% salary increase.
The company justified the increase, saying it had come about because the chief executive had been switched from a staff pension to a senior executive pension scheme.
But Consignia admitted that it had had to change the rules to achieve this. The senior executive scheme was only previously available for managers coming from outside the Post Office, rather than internal appointments such as that of Mr Roberts, who leaves before the end of this year.
