Tag: UK

Allan Leighton, the interim chairman of Consignia, has received backing from ministers for the first stage of his radical restructuring plan as a condition of taking the job on a permanent basis.
Publicly, the Department of Trade and Industry has maintained that the financial crisis facing the Post Office group is a matter for its independent management team to resolve.
However, the redundancies due to be announced today – of up to 15,000 – will require an estimated Pounds 400m from Consignia’s Pounds 2bn reserves to pay for generous severance packages.

Consignia will today pull out of the market for delivering non-urgent business parcels in the biggest admission yet that the government-owned postal group is failing to compete with the private sector.
Allan Leighton, who is expected to be confirmed as the group’s permanent chairman, will argue that Consignia’s parcels division, Parcelforce, is losing too much money to continue serving all customers.
Instead it will concentrate only on express deliveries and the basic parcel services for domestic customers required under its universal service obligations.
The retreat will result in the loss of nearly half of Parcelforce’s 12,000 jobs, slightly more than had been expected when the threat of substantial job losses emerged on Friday.

Consignia, the renamed Post Office, is preparing to give the most generous mass redundancy package ever offered by the government, the Sunday Times said without citing sources.
The company is setting aside as much as 400 mln pounds to cover thousands of job losses, the paper added.
Allan Leighton, Consignia’s chairman, is tomorrow expected to unveil the long-awaited restructuring of the postal network that will eventually result in 30,000 workers losing their jobs or being transferred to the private sector, the Sunday Times went on.