Tag: Royal Mail

UK Post office closure is branded shortsighted

Posted by | Dec 22, 2006 | |

The West Surrey branch of the Federation of Small Business (FSB) has added its voice to the mounting furore over the decision to close 2,500 post offices across the UK.

The organisation which looks after the interests of small businesses has cited that 82% of small firms believe the closure of their local post office would adversely affect them.

While accepting that many sub-post offices are loss making, it has argued that the social need must be put before profit.

A total of 88% of small firms send mail every day, 69% send invoices through the post and 94% of small firms use Royal Mail exclusively.

And with small businesses employing twelve million people the potential for this decision to have a negative knock-on effect on the economy is considerable claims the group.

Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Alistair Darling made the announcement to the House of Commons last week that some post offices will close as early as summer 2007 as part of the cost-cutting move, branded short-sighted by the federation.

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UK postage price changes from April 2007

Posted by | Dec 18, 2006 | |

Royal Mail confirmed today that the price of a First Class stamp for a standard letter weighing up to 100g will rise by 2p to 34p from 2 April 2007, in line with the four-year price control set by postal regulator Postcomm in March 2006.

The price of a First Class stamp for a large letter up to 100g will rise by 4p to 48p.

The price of a Second Class stamp for a standard letter up to 100g will rise by 1p to 24p. The price of a Second Class stamp for a large letter up to 100g will rise by 3p to 40p.

Lorna Clarkson, Royal Mail’s Director of Commercial Policy and Pricing, said: “Now that the UK mail market is open to full competition, it is essential that Royal Mail’s prices more closely reflect the true cost of collecting, sorting and delivering around 80 million items of mail a day to 27 million addresses across the UK.

The price of business mail services will rise at a lesser rate than stamped mail. First Class franked mail and items carrying a printed postage impression (PPI) will attract a 2p discount for items up to 100g. The same discount will also apply to Second Class franked and PPI mail.
Prices will continue to decrease for heavier weight items, which will support the growth of the online retail market. Royal Mail is also offering business customers discounts for machineable mail, and the thresholds for volume discounts have been lowered for some business mail services to enable more customers to benefit.

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Royal Mail hires 3,000 'address detectives'

Posted by | Dec 17, 2006 | |

Its one of the most frantic jobs before Christmas: making sure your greetings cards are sent in plenty of time. But the scribbled addresses on cards in the final post are proving to be a big problem for the Royal Mail.

The service has this year been forced to hire an extra 3,000 workers to decipher bad handwriting on an estimated 400 million poorly labelled packages and envelopes. Bad spelling, illegible handwriting and neglecting to include the postcode have been highlighted as reasons for post not arriving at its intended destination.

The 3,000 extra staff, known as “address detectives”, will be based at Plymouth, Stockport, Stoke and Doxford, in Northumberland, and will join 1,400 permanent staff members who decipher addresses that cannot be read by the Royal Mail’s automated sorting machines.

Letters and parcels with addresses that cannot be sorted by hand by address detectives in sorting offices are scanned into computers and emailed to colleagues, who run internet searches to determine where the mail should be sent.

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2,500 post offices to be axed in the UK from next summer

Posted by | Dec 15, 2006 | |

The government yesterday unveiled plans to close 2,500 rural and urban post offices over 18 months – the fastest closure programme in the history of the network.
The cuts, which are expected to start next summer after national and local consultations, will slash the network to about 11,700 branches, fewer than half the peak of 25,000 in the 1960s. The trade and industry secretary, Alistair Darling, said a GBP1.7bn support package would be provided to fund rationalisation and maintain the GBP150m-a-year payments to the rural network at least until 2011.
He told the Commons that the post office network was losing GBP4m a week and had 4 million fewer customers than two years ago. The “big problem,” he said, was that “people are simply not using post offices as they once did … There is widespread recognition that the current size of the network is unsustainable.”

Royal Mail said it welcomed the proposals and would study their impact on its wider funding needs, which include new investment in the letters business, funding for the pension fund deficit and offering shares to employees.

Mr Darling outlined a series of criteria which the new network would have to meet: 99% of the population must be within three miles of an office and 90% within one mile. In deprived urban areas 99% of the population must be within one mile while in remote areas at least 95% should be within six miles.

The slimmed-down network will be supported by some 500 new outlets, including pubs, churches and village halls and even mobile offices.

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Postwatch response to DTI’s post office closure proposals

Posted by | Dec 14, 2006 | |

On 14 December 2006 the DTI launched its consultation on rationalising the current post office network. The consultation proposed funding the closure of 2,500 post offices throughout the UK. Postwatch has today submitted its response, which includes 99 recommendations.

The Postwatch response can be viewed at www.postwatch.co.uk under policy documents. The executive summary sets out Postwatch’s key recommendations.

Millie Banerjee, Chair of Postwatch, said: “We had to submit a detailed response, with many recommendations, because the DTI failed to explain the thinking behind its proposals. The DTI did not answer even such basic questions as how they arrived at the figure of 2,500 closures, why they proposed the access criteria set out in the consultation and how they plan to avoid additional unplanned closures. We have had to say so much because the DTI said so little.

“The weaknesses of the consultation may actually have made contributors think harder and could lead to a better set of decisions. Whether this happens is now up to DTI ministers. They must consider and respond fully to the complex and important issues that have been raised by us and others.

“We all want the DTI’s decision document to be a thorough, well thought out piece of work. It must unambiguously explain to customers and their representatives how and why the pain ahead will eventually result in a viable and sustainable, if somewhat smaller, nationwide network of post offices that provides reasonable access for all.

“DTI Ministers have said their decision will be made within 3 weeks. This could give the impression, perhaps wrongly, that decisions have already been taken. But it is, of course, the quality of the decision, not the speed at which it is made, that counts. Ministers will need to demonstrate that they have given the many hundreds of responses the careful consideration they deserve.”

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