Tag: Royal Mail

Post Office attracts GBP 3 billion in savings (UK)

Posted by | Feb 12, 2008 | |

Post Office Financial Services has attracted over GBP 3 billion in savings deposits and has won half a million car insurance customers, strengthening its position as one of the fastest growing financial services providers in the UK.

The success of Post Office’s instant access savings account – Instant Saver – is largely due to the consistently good rate it offers customers (currently 5.75 per cent). And a guarantee to remain within one per cent of the base rate for the life of the account – one of the best deals available on the high street.

Post OfficeCar Insurance offers drivers great value cover through a panel of insurers to search for the best deal. This, along with offers of GBP 50 cash back or one month free, has resulted in more than 500,000 policies for the Post Office since launch in July 2004.

Post Office Van Insurance – which is aimed at small business owners – is also booming, hitting over 12,000 sales in just under a year, taking it well on the way to having the biggest market share for this product.
This week Post Office also reached significant motor insurance milestones. Post Office Car Insurance policies now exceed half a million and Post Office Van Insurance has achieved more than 12,000 sales in less than a year.

Post Office Financial Services is a joint venture between the Post Office and Bank of Ireland, which has strived to offer customers great value with fair and easy to understand products.

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Royal Mail plans mobile working for 130,000 (UK)

Posted by | Feb 12, 2008 | |

Royal Mail is planning to give more of its workforce mobile devices to link up remotely with various back-office applications in use across the organisation.

It has put out a tender for a framework agreement to supply mobile application, systems integration, service management and in-life management support for a pool of up to 130,000 mobile devices that it is yet to buy.

The framework agreement – a formal arrangement with suppliers to establish the precise terms of numerous linked contracts – will run for an initial two years with annual extension options available for a further three years.

The contracts up for grabs include one to provide project management and lifecycle assurance and another covering systems integration.

A third contract covers service management, including but not confined to incident management, problem management, change management, release management and security management.

The management of the 130,000 or so handheld devices is covered in a separate contract designed to keep the hardware working and up-to-date at all times.

Royal Mail has said it expects to engage in a “competitive dialogue” with up to five service providers before placing the contracts.

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24th UPU Congress changes location

Posted by | Feb 11, 2008 | |

Given the current situation in Kenya, the Universal Postal Union’s Council of Administration on Friday decided to change the venue of the 24th Universal Postal Congress from Nairobi, Kenya, to Geneva, Switzerland.
The UPU Congress was scheduled to take place in Nairobi from 13 August to 3 September 2008. The event attended by about 1,500 delegates from the UPU’s 191 member countries will now take place in Geneva from mid-July to early August; the exact dates remain to be confirmed.
A resolution adopted by the Council also recommends that Congress approve Kenya’s chairmanship of that Congress as well as the chairmanship of the UPU Council of Administration from 2009-2012. It will also recommend promoting Nairobi as the venue for the UPU Strategy Conference in 2010.
Kenya has not yet communicated its response to this resolution.
The UPU must hold a Congress every four years. The last one was held in Bucharest, Romania, in 2004. The situation in Kenya currently prevents the UPU International Bureau to work effectively with Kenya on continuing to organize a Congress in Nairobi. As a specialized agency of the United Nations, the UPU follows UN security rules. At the moment, the UN has implemented security phase II in Nairobi and phase III in the entire Rift Valley. As such, all non-essential UN missions to Kenya remain suspended.

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Britain to axe 2,500 post offices

Posted by | Feb 9, 2008 | |

British authorities say village post offices are becoming a casualty of the Internet as more people go online to pay bills and use e-mail.

“Customer numbers have gone down about 4 million per week compared to a couple of years ago and the losses are rising,” said Pat McFadden, the man named by the British government to pick 2,500 post offices for closure this year.

The British postal network loses about USD 7 million a week and hundreds of British post offices attract as few as 16 customers a week, on average, The Times of London reported Saturday.

Post offices in Britain, especially those in villages, continue to be used by large numbers of the elderly, who view the closures as a sign of disrespect toward them and fear their communities will change for the worse, the Times reported.

“No one comes into politics to do something that can be very unpopular locally to the people affected, and I am very aware of that,” McFadden said. “But sometimes governments have to take difficult decisions and make difficult changes. This is one of those occasions.”

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Royal Mail: Delivering easier ways to work for disabled people (UK)

Posted by | Feb 8, 2008 | |

Royal Mail Group has formed a new partnership with the Department for Work and Pensions as part of the Jobcentre Plus Access to Work programme, which aims to make it easier to bring more of the 6.8 million disabled men and women of working age into employment.

Access to Work currently helps thousands of workers and their employers to overcome barriers resulting from disability by offering practical advice and funding.

Royal Mail will build on the successful scheme by creating a dedicated national team which will respond to managers’ questions relating to the recruitment or the ongoing needs of disabled employees.

Working within a new ‘one-stop-shop’ Accessibility Resource Centre, advisors will support individual team leaders with the application process. Royal Mail will also pay all claims under GBP 1,000 incurred under the scheme, including premises adaptation, travel and ongoing support workers, and will share any costs in excess of this with Access to Work.

In the past, some employers have struggled to take advantage of the benefits of the scheme, but it is hoped that Royal Mail’s pilot will streamline the process considerably, galvanizing other business leaders to invest in similar, simplified arrangements.

Kay Allen, Head of Social Policy and Inclusion at Royal Mail Group, said: “Facilitating the employment of disabled workers is a key priority for us as a diversity-aware business. The best way to do this is to make it as easy as possible for our people to become “disability confident”.

“We’re aiming to use this pilot to demonstrate new ways in which large employers can take advantage of the Access to Work scheme: helping to ease some of the country’s 3.3 million economically inactive disabled people into work.”

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