The Royal Mail should consider delivering pension money and child benefit to homes as part of a new approach to postal services, Postcomm, the industry regulator has suggested.
Graham Corbett, Postcomm’s chairman, said more emphasis should be put on availability of services and less on the number of post offices, claiming that sub-postmasters with only a handful of customers could not be expected to stay open indefinitely.
Read MoreAccording to the Daily Telegraph (UK), “Consignia may be penalised by Postcomm as much as 10% of its turnover as the former Post Office failed to meet its delivery targets in the first quarter. The company reported that only 86.1% of first class mail met the next-day delivery guarantee for the period, a figure that Consignia needs to bring up to the regulator’s 92.1% threshold for the financial year. Reliability this September will be affected by the terrorist attacks in the US, which grounded the company’s postal fleet and led to a week-long delay of US deliveries. Disrupted rail services in the UK has also affected Consignia’s schedule.”
Read MoreThere can’t be many plcs less than a year old, that can boast brand
equity dating back hundreds of years.
Consignia, formerly the Post Office Group, became a publicly listed
company in March, inheriting the august brands of Royal Mail, the Post
Office and Parcelforce Worldwide.
But with its new independence comes a newly deregulated and competitive
market, and all, including Consignia, agree it’s going to be tough out
there. The Postal Services Act last year stripped the Post Office of
its monopoly on collecting and delivering post (though post costing
less than £1 is still covered). In June, three other postal operators
got the go-ahead from regulator PostComm to tackle Consignia’s
business.
ARE WE about to witness the death, by a thousand cuts, of the Royal Mail? Yesterday Hays, the distribution and logistics company, was awarded the first licence to operate against Royal Mail. But no sooner had the regulator signed off Hays’s licence to operate business services in London, Manchester and Edinburgh than two other would-be rivals popped up – UK Mail a division of Business Post and Deya
Read MoreDELIVERIES of letters to homes before 9.30am may be ended unless residents pay special fees, under plans being put forward by the postal watchdog to cut delays.
Read More
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