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Postal staff in Northampton could lose up to GBP 1,000 a year in pay, customers could get their post later – and it’s all being blamed on the European Union.

Royal Mail is consulting workers on a change to start times from 5am to 7.15am, which would also mean the later deliveries for customers.

It is blaming a new European Union directive limiting lorry speeds to 56mph rather than the current 60mph for all trucks weighing 3.5 tonnes or more.

Apparently the new law will mean mail deliveries will take longer to reach depots, meaning staff with an early start could be left with little to do.

One staff member from Royal Mail’s Northampton depot, who preferred to remain anonymous, contacted the Herald & Post outraged at the proposal.

Communication Workers Union regional secretary Lee Barron said his organisation had not yet been involved in discussions.

A Royal Mail spokesman said management had discussed the issue with staff at Northampton’s St James Mill depot on Tuesday.

He said staff wages had three-year protection so workers affected would not feel an immediate pinch.

Tucked away at the end of an 83-page report by Postcomm, the regulator which oversees postal services in the UK, is an annexe that contains some very important figures: the profit and loss account for the Royal Mail’s operation of its Postcode Address File.

PAF, as it is known, contains the details for 27m addresses in the UK. It is a very valuable file, for as it underpins a huge part of the economy: not just the delivery of more than 80m postal items per day (which underpins Royal Mail’s annual GBP 9bn revenue), but also third-party businesses that rely on postcodes. Direct marketing is one, but there is a burgeoning market too for postcodes in vehicle satellite navigation systems, location-aware devices and a panoply of distance and search sites.

So how much does it cost Royal Mail to run and update PAF, and how profitable is it? The figures acquired by Postcomm show that for 2005-06, the PAF unit within Royal Mail had an income of GBP 18.4m and costs of GBP 16.8m, more than half of the latter coming from maintaining it. The result: a profit of GBP 1.6m, or 8.6% of revenues. That, Postcomm says, is about the right level for PAF profitability, which it suggests should be between 8% and 10% of revenues.

The Free Our Data campaign has a solution: make PAF free online and remove the copyright restrictions on reselling it. The revenue impact on Royal Mail would be minimal; yet as well as engendering a lot of goodwill inside the public sector, doing so could encourage new private sector businesses presently put off by the cost. It’s government-owned data; we should all get its benefit.

Union leaders raised the threat of industrial action among tens of thousands of postal workers in a row over pay.

Talks will be held over the next two days between the Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union in a bid to avert a dispute.

According to the union, Royal Mail is proposing a freeze on basic pay and officials warned that unless there was a “dramatic change” in the Royal Mail’s attitude there was no prospect of a deal being made.

In a letter to its members, the union warned that a “major dispute” was inevitable unless a better offer was made in the next few days.

According to the union, Royal Mail has offered lump sums ranging between GBP 250 and GBP 550 but conditional on the union agreeing new working practices and GBP 350m worth of cuts.

Engineering administration workers are being offered nothing on basic pay or in lump sums according to the union.

The union accused Royal Mail of “abandoning” an agreed approach on growing the business and accused the organisation of being panicked into a “cost cutting frenzy” in every workplace.

A spokesman for the Royal Mail said: “We are continuing to talk privately to the unions about how to achieve a sensible, fair and affordable deal for our people at a time when we need to pay GBP 730m into our pension fund every year and when our rivals are already handling one mail item in every eight.