Tag: Royal Mail

Royal Mail axes 37 post offices (UK)

Posted by | May 13, 2008 | |

Royal Mail is axing 37 post offices across County Durham, Teesside and North Yorkshire.

A Royal Mail spokesman said the first closures were scheduled to take place towards the end of June.

Areas affected include Darlington, Bishop Auckland, Spennymoor, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Stockton, Northallerton and Richmond.

In addition to the closures, another two branches in North Yorkshire are being replaced by limited services in village halls.

The closure decision follows a six-week consultation process.

Adrian Wales, post office network development manager for the North East, said 99 pct of people in the region would still be within one mile of a branch, or would see no change to their existing services.

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Royal Mail to carry on fight for zonal pricing (UK)

Posted by | May 12, 2008 | |

Royal Mail is seeking a judicial review of Postcomm’s decision to reject plans for the introduction of a retail zonal pricing scheme.

As competition increases in the commercial postal market, Royal Mail proposed zonal pricing to reflect its obligation to deliver anywhere in the UK.

Royal Mail’s ‘zonal pricing’ refers to a system where senders of postal items would be charged variable rates depending on the geographic location of the recipients.

Direct mail and magazine printers have been eagerly watching developments as they could impact on the cost of campaigns

In most cases, the zonal pricing structure will make rates higher for deliveries to rural areas and lower for deliveries to urban areas and business districts.

The changes would affect the pricing structures of bulk mailers using Royal Mail’s Mailsort (120, 700 and 1400), Presstream and Walksort services, while not affecting the pricing for regular stamped mail.

Neither Postcomm nor Royal Mail would comment further, but the regulator said it had not ruled out any future moves towards zonal pricing and was open to alternatives that overcame the problems in the recent application.

Royal Mail already applies a zonal pricing structure to some of its independent agreements, under which it delivers mail the final mile for large customers and other postal operators.

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Disenchanted companies desert Royal Mail (UK)

Posted by | May 12, 2008 | |

Business customers are deserting Royal Mail and most firms do not find the postal group an efficient organisation to work with, a study by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) for The Times has revealed.
The BCC sought the views of nearly 1,000 businesses throughout the country about their use of Royal Mail and their experience of the organisation.
Sixty-eight per cent said that they did not find the postal group to be a “professional, efficient organisation to do business with”; 55 per cent said that Royal Mail was less reliable than it was five years ago and only 8 per cent thought that it had improved.
In a striking example of how much electronic communication has hit the use of postal services, nearly 86 per cent of businesses said that they used the internet and e-mail for transactions that they would have put through Royal Mail five years ago.
The BCC survey comes as the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP) gives warning today that 3,000 more post offices may be forced to shut if the Government withdraws post offices’ rights to handle benefits and pension payments through the post office card account.
Royal Mail is in the middle of a programme to shut 2,500 post offices in its loss-making network.
Subpostmasters will press the Government to renew the contract for the post office card account when it comes up for review next year.

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Syslore to deliver an address recognition system for Itella (FIN)

Posted by | May 12, 2008 | |

Itella Mail Communication and the Finnish software company Syslore Ltd. have signed a contract for the delivery of an address recognition and matching system for mail sorting and electronic message delivery services. By adopting the Syslore mCorrection Receiver Matching EngineTM (RME) fuzzy matching system, Itella will improve the address and receiver recognition quality in their hybrid and electronic message delivery service and increase the level of automation in their mail sorting process. The system will be deployed to all Itella address recognition processes by 2010 in Finland and abroad. The contract is worth over four million euros. “With this investment, we want to intensify and automate physical and electronic address recognition processes. Our goal is to ensure the profitability of the delivery business and to be able to provide quality delivery services for our business and consumer customers also in the future,” says Kari Kivikoski, Senior Vice President, Itella Mail Communication. http://www.syslore.com/

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Postcomm refutes Daily Telegraph article suggesting an end to Saturday deliveries (UK)

Posted by | May 10, 2008 | |

Postcomm has today totally refuted the suggestion in today’s “Daily Telegraph” that it is to recommend a reduction in postal deliveries from six days to five and is asking the newspaper to publish a retraction.

Postcomm’s stance is that the only threat to Saturday deliveries, for as long as customers need them, is from Royal Mail failing to be an efficient provider of the universal service.

The Saturday delivery is enshrined in law, in the Postal Service Act 2000, and so this, in any event, is not an issue over which Postcomm has any powers. Our commitment to secure a universal service valued by customers is just as strong as Royal Mail’s and we do not want to see any denigration of the service.

Although the universal service made a loss for the first time last year (2007/08), the size of that loss has been increased by GBP 30m by a change in cost allocation by Royal Mail that now charges all freehold property at market rents.

Royal Mail should focus on becoming more efficient in managing the national asset of the universal service.

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