The Royal Mail is a Royal Mess. The Hooper report merely clarifies the obvious. It does however appear to want to refuse to grasp the nettle. The abolishment of a Quasi Monopoly.
12 years ago the Royal Mail was an inefficient monopoly. It made a handsome profit, it paid into its pension fun. The fine Mr Brown then decided to steal all its profits, he also plundered its pension pot.
He decided that he would employ Messer’s Leighton and Crozier. The two new appointees rather than modernising this fine institution and preparing it for the new millennium, decided to dogmatically protect its monopoly, and by default strengthen the CWU.
So what has this left us: a lower service level, more expensive post, a strong and Ludite union, oh and huge losses.
Here is the Lord Allesley plan for the Royal Mail.
Break it up and privatise it!
This increases competition, creates efficiency, plugs the pension and gives greater service. At the same time it protects the Universal Service.
The plan looks like this.
Inputing to the system can be by anyone with a licence, TNT, UK Mail, you name it.
For delivery break the UK into regions, some rural, some urban. Obviously urban makes money, rural potentially loses.
Then bundle up the areas and sell franchises(the Royal Mail) for bundles. It works like this:
Whoever gets (for example) Greater London , also gets Highland and Islands. If you get Manchester you also get Cornwall.
Any company can bid for these bundles, they may pay, they may just offer to take on the pension deficit. In the tender process they not only agree to a fixed minimum handling fee per letter (preserve the Universal Service), they also put in their service levels such as time of latest delivery etc.
These contracts would be 5 years for starters, after that we would have real proof of delivery. Only those that give the service levels will get new licenses.
This way we introduce competition, we get customer service. Potentially the Treasury even makes money.
LA admits this plan needs to be refined. It is however the only way forward.
It is seamless to the consumer and painless for the taxpayer.
The Swinney slump continues
6 hours ago
2 comments:
Painless? It will be quite the opposite if TNT are involved - they already have a low reputation among UK businesses for their inability to deliver on time and their distressing tendency to just lose items consigned to them.
LA is in no way saying TNT are a panacea. Far from it. However Royal Mail are incredibly poor and have no concept of customer service. Here is a news report from earlier this year.
"Despite the company reaching its national target of 93 per cent, it failed to meet the figure in Coventry and Warwickshire, Worcester, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Stoke-on-Trent where just 89.5 per cent of first class mail arrived on time in the six months to September."
The most incredible part of this is not the missing of the target but the target of just 93%!!! What other company would be given a 93% target that would be acceptable. LA is a large client of TNT, UK Mail and Royal Mail, spending many hundres of thousands of pounds per year with them. None is great, Royal Mail is a joke.
LA
Post a Comment