Tag: Royal Mail

Royal Mail has announced a number of new benefits for customers, including discounts for large business mailings using correct addresses.

A new product, Cleanmail Advance, has been launched by Royal Mail as a way to provide a financial incentive to business mailers in ensuring that their mailshots carry the correct addresses.

Through the Cleanmail Advance product, customers will be given easier access to discounts when sending more than 1,000 items with correct addresses that that can be read by machine.

Cleansing databases of old or redundant customer address records, known as ‘dirty data’, is a prime way of reducing wasted mail costs – and reducing unnecessary work for postal service workers.

Another new product is designed to reward businesses that send a minimum of 250 large letter-sized items and ensure they can be easily read by the machines, as part of an initiative by Royal Mail to increase its automation.

Ministers in the UK are likely to approve plans that would give tens of thousands of Royal Mail workers “phantom shares” in the company, linking their pay to the state-owned postal operator’s performance.

The plan, the details of which have yet to be agreed by Alistair Darling, trade and industry secretary, and Allan Leighton, Royal Mail chairman, could lead to its employees being handed up to GBP5,000 each in the shares over five years.

The shares would be bought and sold like real ones, within a trust mirroring the scheme at John Lewis, the retail group.

The phantom shares favoured by ministers would behave like shares and go up and down in value in line with the company’s performance. But they would confer no ownership rights.

Both sides said on Thursday night no final decision had been taken on how to incentivise staff. It is believed Mr Leighton would accept a phantom scheme, provided the value matched his proposal of GBP5,000 over five years.

Mr Leighton has been lobbying the government to set up an employee share ownership scheme as an essential move to win the co-operation of employees in restructuring and modernisation. But the CWU argues this would be tantamount to privatisation and 199 Labour MPs have opposed it in a Commons motion.