Tag: Europe

The arrival of foreign competition and liberalisation of the national postal service may result in new postal codes

Posted by | May 5, 2008 | |

Liberalisation of postal services may be the demise of the nation’s 40-year-old postal codes as the system, devised and administered by Post Danmark, may undergo drastic reform in the upcoming liberalisation of the nation’s postal service.

One proponent of such a reform is Citymail, Post Danmark’s only competitor.

Jarle Trandokken, Norwegian state-owned Citymail’s Danish chief executive, said that the number of postal codes needed to be increased to encompass more addresses and making sorting easier.

To speed up the sorting process easier, Post Danmark invested in advanced sorting machines for scanning post, and Trandokken said it was unreasonable for new players on the market to have to make such substantial investments.

The Road and Transport Agency, the body responsible for inspection of the postal services, acknowledged that a postal liberalisation also came with considerations of reform in the area. However, Mogens Antonsen, a consultant with the agency said the present postal code system was not considered an obstacle.

In the mean time, Helge Israelsen, Post Danmark’s chief executive, said that he was unwilling to change the present postal system to accommodate Citymail’s objections.

The present postal codes were implemented in 1967. Larger cities have a number ending with two or three zeros and smaller towns, as far as possible, have a number ending with one zero.

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Deutsche Post to postpone launch of free weekly until autumn

Posted by | May 5, 2008 | |

Deutsche Post AG will keep plans to launch a free weekly newspaper on hold until autumn to allay criticism from Germany’s newspaper publishers and from politicians, Financial Times Deutschland reported, citing company sources.

The postal services company is seeking to keep a lower profile after it was criticised for being exempt from Germany’s general sales tax and chief executive Frank Appel is trying to prevent the project from being discussed at the company’s annual general meeting on Tuesday, Financial Times Deutschland said.

Deutsche Post had initially worked on a weekly publication with a focus on news about the Internet, telecommunication and computer, which was slated to be distributed to households for free and generate revenues from advertising.

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The Irish Postmasters’ Union seeks retention of welfare payments

Posted by | May 4, 2008 | |

The Irish Postmasters’ Union (IPU) has called on the Government to retain the Post Office network as the provider of choice for the delivery of welfare payments.

Speaking at the IPU’s annual conference in Mullingar, the union’s general secretary called for the retention of the contract in order to halt the closure of post offices.

IPU General Secretary John Kane said: “The network is currently in rapid decline. There are now 1200 Post Offices following 500 closures in the past eight years and the stark fact is that the future of there being a localised network depends on the retention of social welfare business.”

According to IPU figures, the share of the social welfare contract handled by Post Offices declined from 80% in 1998 to 55% in 2005, as people pay directly into their bank accounts.

The government is currently reviewing the social welfare contract and has yet to make a decision on a future policy regarding the delivery of payments.

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Royal Mail strikes caused by modernisation changes (UK)

Posted by | May 3, 2008 | |

Royal Mail, in it’s application to the Postal Services Commission for relief from the impact of Industrial Action, said that a number of factors had caused a drop in quality of service in 2007 but the underlying cause was industrial action brought on by essential changes to make the business more efficient. It said the changes formed part of the loan it had secured from government to modernise the business.

The application timetabled the impact of events caused by national, rolling, and wildcat strikes but said that it was not possible to “identify every small event that contributed to the wider degradation in quality of service during the year as a result of work to rule and go-slow activity”.

It said that settling the industrial dispute on unsatisfactory terms had not been an option and in finding a solution to the dispute, the transformation of Royal Mail and the funding secured by government had to be protected as much as the long term interests of Royal Mail and it’s customers.

Royal Mail said that as well as industrial action over pay and conditions, it had also experienced industrial action over delivery office closures which again, were part of an overall plan to make the business more efficient. In addition, the new EC legislation relating to 56mph driving speed restrictions for 7.5 tonne vehicles, which became law in January 2008, required the restructuring of Royal Mail’s network operations and duty patterns in delivery, resulting in changes to the start time for over 100,000 delivery postmen and women. It said the CWU had used the changes as both a bargaining and propaganda tool during the dispute.

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Canada Post set to deliver fatal blow to rural mail service

Posted by | May 3, 2008 | |

If you have a rural mailbox, walk to the end of your driveway and kiss it goodbye. Canada Post is engaged in an aggressive campaign to eliminate traditional rural mail delivery. The stupidity of the program is exceeded only by the cost.

Tens of thousands of Canadians have already had service to their rural mail boxes cut off, including 200 in Ottawa. The number nationally could reach the hundreds of thousands if Canada Post has its way.

The problem, Canada Post says, is heavy rural traffic volumes that make delivery to end-of-the-lane boxes unsafe. Rural mail carriers have filed 1,700 health and safety complaints since 2004, and Canada Post is simply putting safety first, says corporate spokesman Sachin Despande.

No one is against safety, but the magnitude of Canada Post’s response is stunningly out of proportion to the problem. There are 843,000 roadside mailboxes in Canada. The corporation is reviewing the safety of each and every one of them, using a complex series of criteria developed by three separate consulting firms.

The cost of the rural mailbox program is $500 million over three years.

Yes, that’s half a billion dollars to deal with what’s actually a relatively small number of health and safety complaints.

The post office is averaging a little over 400 driver complaints a year. More than half of those, the company acknowledges, are ergonomics-related.

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