Tag: Royal Mail

Royal Mail to merge sorting sites (UK)

Posted by | May 16, 2008 | |

Royal Mail has announced the closure of two mail distribution centres in the Thames Valley.

After a period of public consultation the company has decided to press ahead with a plan to consolidate its centres in Oxford, Reading and Swindon.

The new Thames Valley Mail Centre will be based at an expanded Swindon site.

Building work at Swindon is due to be completed by October and the transfer of work from Reading and Oxford is scheduled for June 2009.

A spokesman for Royal Mail said it was unclear at this stage how jobs would be affected but he said they would be carrying out consultations with staff.

In a statement, the company said: “In a fully competitive postal market Royal Mail needs to change and this project represents a big step forward in making changes that will benefit our customers, our business and our people.

“Some GBP 20 million is being invested in this project and once complete, the new Thames Valley Mail Centre at Swindon will be the largest, state of the art mail centre in the country.”

Reading’s mail centre was “no longer fit for purpose” said the company as it was high maintenance, outdated and unsuitable.

Instead a new delivery office for central Reading will be developed.

The company added that delivery and collection operations across the Swindon and Oxford postcode areas would not be affected.

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Warsaw is cultural capital with the lowest price tag

Posted by | May 16, 2008 | |

Culture vultures who want to save hundreds of pounds on the cost of an arts and entertainment-packed short break should head for Warsaw. The Polish capital was far and away the cheapest city for a cultural weekend away, according to the new Cost of Culture report conducted by Post Office® Travel Services.¹

Even though sterling buys 22 per cent fewer Polish zloty than a year ago, the GBP 75 price tag – which included visits to Warsaw’s historic art galleries, museums and heritage sites, together with nights at the renowned Polish National Opera, ballet and a symphony concert² – weighed in at less than 25 per cent of the equivalent London cost.

London proved by far the most expensive of the 10 cultural capitals surveyed by the Post Office®. Its itinerary of 10 cultural highlights, which included trips to the Royal Opera House, Buckingham Palace and the Victoria & Albert Museum, costs around GBP 308, despite the offer of free entry to its national museums and galleries.

By contrast, while the sliding pound has made Prague up to 25 per cent more expensive than a year ago, the Czech capital rates as great value for lovers of the arts. It was second only to Warsaw, at just under GBP 104 for a culture-filled trip.

The survey of Europe and North America’s top cultural centres included six eurozone capitals and, as with other price comparison reports by the Post Office®, revealed a huge disparity in costs between these destinations.

The Cost of Culture survey identifies the five best value choices for each of the six cultural categories researched (allowing one entry per city in each category)³ and found that Paris was the only city not to feature. However clued-up culture vultures can cut their costs by visiting Paris on the first Sunday of each month, when galleries are free.4

The Post Office® Cost of Culture survey is available online for holidaymakers to view at postoffice.co.uk/costofculture

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Funding from the private sector will help Royal Mail deliver a valued universal service (UK)

Posted by | May 14, 2008 | |

Postcomm said that a universal service that is financially viable and safeguarded for the future is most likely to be achieved through a radical transformation of the governance and structure of Royal Mail.

Postcomm concluded in its first submission to the independent review of the postal market that Royal Mail’s current business model is unsustainable and that, unless some bold actions are taken very quickly, it is highly likely that its letters business will move to a position of managed – but accelerating – decline.

In its second submission Postcomm says:

– With the mail market now in structural decline, because of the increasing impact of e-mail and the Internet, Royal Mail needs access to private capital and a stronger set of incentives to enable it to restructure and become more profitable;
– Partnerships with the private sector, such as we are seeing in some European countries, could serve as a catalyst to more rapid transformation and greater efficiency from the universal service provider;
– As competition develops in segments of the market, it can replace regulation as the force which protects customers’ interests. This – and the need for much more transparency about the costs of Royal Mail’s business – will be a major theme of Postcomm’s proposals for the regulatory framework post April 2010;
– The transformation of Royal Mail will ensure a more dynamic mail market that can respond quickly and effectively to changing customer needs as mail increasingly is challenged by electronic media.

Postcomm believes competition and liberalisation should continue to be promoted as they are delivering far better customer focus and strong incentives for all mail operators to innovate and to become more efficient. Competition has already benefited large customers, and choice is now becoming available to smaller businesses. The regulator also urges the removal of artificial barriers to postal market entry – including the removal of new entrants’ VAT disadvantage – which could encourage wider competitor involvement in the collection, sorting and delivery of mail.

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Semi-private Royal Mail?

Posted by | May 14, 2008 | |

The Postal Regulator is calling for Royal Mail to be partly privatised.

Postcomm is making the highly contentious proposal – which could lead to Royal Mail being owned in part by a private-equity firm – to an independent review on the future of postal services that has been set up by the government.

It says that Royal Mail’s financial difficulties are likely to worsen considerably, without the injection of private-sector capital and management expertise into the state-owned business.

Nigel Stapleton, the chairman of Postcomm, has warned in an interivew with me that in the absence of part-privatisation the government may be required to inject a big new subsidy into Royal Mail, which it won’t wish to do.

The risk of not bringing in the private sector or a subsidy would be a significant deterioration in the quality of Royal Mail’s service under its obligation to deliver letters to and from anywhere in the UK at a uniform tariff, he said.

Only last week Royal Mail announced that it had made a loss on providing this so-called universal service for the first time. Royal Mail estimated that the loss for the last financial year on this its core activity was GBP 100m.

The government will find it hard to dismiss the suggestion out of hand, especially since analysts believe the independent review led by Richard Hooper is expected to come to the same conclusion.

However the Prime Minister is likely to be irked that such a divisive issue is being forced back on to his agenda.

Privatisation in any form, whole or part, is strongly opposed by the CWU, the main postal workers’ union – which is also a leading funder of the Labour Party.

The CWU’s opposition is shared by many Labour MPs.

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Understanding the postal needs of small businesses (UK). L13982

Posted by | May 14, 2008 | |

The UK’s 4 million small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are an important sector – rightly described as the engine room of the economy. This sector has, however, been largely ignored in terms of developments in their postal services since competition was introduced. The competitive battle ground has, until now, been tightly focussed on winning the business of the bulk mailing companies.

Postwatch, the watchdog for postal services, commissioned RS Consulting to research the way SMEs both use the postal services and how they could see them changing. Postwatch has today published on its website the results “SMEs’ current and future postal needs”. Visit www.postwatch.co.uk/research to see the report.

Speaking at a Postcomm seminar organised to discuss last year’s strike action by Royal Mail employees Millie Banerjee, CBE, Chair of Postwatch said; “The research Postwatch publishes today highlights that as well as their ‘sending’ needs SMEs also rely heavily on the mail they receive. For these businesses the cheques really are in the post and they want them delivered as early as possible. They also want there to be a significant gap between the daily delivery of post and the last collection of the day, so that they can respond in day.

“Last year’s strike action would have been very worrying for many small businesses. If it had continued some small businesses may have struggled to recover. Royal Mail has to find a better way to resolve its disputes.

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