If you have hopes on mail, Consignia them here now

IF YOUR mail fails to arrive on March 26, it’s probably just business as
usual
for the Post Office, an example of its first rule: the more important the
letter, the less the chance of it being delivered the next day. On the other
hand, there may be no mail that day, or any subsequent day, because
Consignia,
as the Post Office wants us to call it, has failed to get the necessary
licence
from Postcomm – which is not the company’s website, but the new postal
services
regulator. Postcomm is a product of Labour’s botched Postal Services Act,
and as
you’d expect, it has huge powers to interfere. If the Post Office fails to
achieve specified standards of service or fails to “make arrangements for
other
postal operators to have access to its network of postal facilities” its
licence
to post can be withdrawn. This arrangement is patently absurd. The Royal
Mail,
as even the dimmest regulator will soon spot, is a 100pc monopoly.
The threat to withdraw its licence is an empty one, even though there is no
convincing reason for it to have a monopoly in the first place. Successive
governments have funked tackling this, scared off by the almost entirely
bogus
arguments that without a monopoly the rural post offices would disappear,
and
outlying areas get an even worse service than they do today. The posties’
strong-arm tactics have produced an Act that claims to be designed to
introduce
competition, but which is likely to have precisely the opposite effect. No
other
operator is allowed to charge less than pounds 1 a letter, a restrictive
practice so unsupportable that even the European Commission is trying to
force a
relaxation. The Act allows that anyone can apply for a licence to charge
less,
but the conditions should ensure that nobody does. At the same time, the
obligation on Consignia to allow others access to its network sounds
ominously
like Oftel’s requirement for BT to allow competitors into its telephone
exchanges, and we all know what a runaway success that’s been. So if the
mail
does fail to arrive on that Monday in March, rest assured the monopoly will
get
it to you eventually. Probably. [email protected]
DAILY TELEGRAPH, 30th January 2001