Tag: Royal Mail

Adam Crozier spoke to Jeff Randall on BBC 5 Live on Sunday night about the changes at Royal Mail in more recent years.

He said that Royal Mail had suffered from lack of investment by previous governments and that meant they were technically lagging behind as well as not being as efficient as they need to be.

However he said there was no point in dwelling on what should or should not have been done and they needed to get on with the job of modernisation and providing an efficient service. He said that Royal Mail is bringing in new products to widen the scope of the services they provide and to help Post Offices but 14,000 are private businesses and far too many are creating massive losses for Royal Mail.

On High Street closures he said that many of them have very high rents and are unsustainable. Money saved by transferring service to WH Smith can be spent on other crown post offices.

One postman asked how much more efficient can a postman be? Crozier said automation was really the key to efficiency as many posties are presently spending 40% of their time sorting.

On pay, he said it was clearly a difficult time for Royal Mail and it needed to be competitive. Postal workers are currently paid 25%-30% more than competition. All Royal Mail directors are also having a pay freeze this year and that finding a way to reward workers for being efficient is something they are trying to organise. If not, they will lose more business and more jobs.

Its immaculate cobbled crescents and scrubbed stone porches are typical of Edinburgh’s refined and orderly New Town. But the EH3 district – home to top law firms, foreign consulates and some of Europe’s most exclusive residential addresses – had Scotland’s highest number of complaints about its postal service last year.

In 2006, cumulative first-class next-day deliveries stood at 93.5 per cent for Edinburgh, 92.1 per cent for Dundee and 93.6 per cent for Glasgow for the first three-quarters of last year – all comfortably ahead of targets set by the regulator, Postcomm.

But all three lag behind Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, Cardiff, Nottingham and Sheffield. Only Aberdeen, with an impressive 95.6 per cent, drags Scotland up the league table.

Half of residents had their mail left in the hall or communal stairs at least once a week. One-third of all residents had lost items of mail, including credit cards, bank statements, chequebooks, concert tickets and medical test results. Many residents reported receiving no mail for several days, followed by a bundle in a red rubber band.

Even the Postwatch questionnaire itself fell victim to the problem: 12 per cent were not delivered until between four and eight working days after posting.

Royal Mail says the problems are down to the number of tenements in Edinburgh and Glasgow, many of which have no names on doors or main entrances which prevent access to delivery staff during the day.

Despite these challenges, performance in Edinburgh improved dramatically during 2006.