Author: Archive

Thousands of letters are this weekend dropping through the letterboxes of postal workers. Letters from the boss. And they do not make comfortable reading. He is wounded by last week’s devastatingly critical Despatches documentary on Channel 4 and lacerated by Press criticism of declining standards.

Now Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton has written to all 200,000 staff in a desperate attempt to keep his modernisation programme on track. He has to keep his huge workforce behind him as he attempts to drive through what he describes as ‘probably the biggest transition in British industry for 20 years’.

Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Royal Mail, has started a board-level review of staff recruitment and training policies following damaging revelations broadcast in a television documentary last week.

An undercover reporter filmed mail left unsorted while workers were skiving, stealing from and dumping letters. It also showed untrained temporary staff being sent out on delivery and failing to complete their rounds. “Clearly, at board level we need to review some of our procedures and practices with regard to recruitment and training,” Crozier told The Sunday Telegraph. However, Crozier rejected the overall picture painted by the Dispatches documentary on Channel 4 of a shambolic organisation with slack management.

Suggestions that the Royal Mail could be privatised have been dismissed by the Government.

The denial followed a report that some of the City’s biggest investment banks had approached the Government in a bid to take the company private in the next year to 18 months. It was reported in the Financial Mail on Sunday that Richard Gillingwater, head of the Shareholder Executive which advises Whitehall on its role as owner of Royal Mail, discussed the possible sale with top City bankers.

A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry said: “We haven’t got any plans to privatise it.”

Postal union leaders will this week tell Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt that she must put the brakes on the commercialisation of the Royal Mail to prevent the disintegration of the service.

Communication Workers Union leader Billy Hayes and his deputy Dave Ward will meet Hewitt on Wednesday and demand that Labour’s election manifesto include a review of the 2000 Postal Services Act, which set in train the process for liberalising the Royal Mail.

Some of the City’s biggest investment banks are believed to have approached the Government to seek a mandate to privatise Royal Mail within the next year to 18 months.

It is understood that Richard Gillingwater, who heads the Shareholder Executive, which advises Whitehall on its role as owner of the company, has held meetings with top City bankers to discuss the sale of the business.