Results tagged “Royal Mail” from Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

Anyone else despair about the state of the poor old Royal Mail? There seems to be a concerted Government and management policy of destroying it and flogging off the carcass to German or Dutch carpetbaggers.

Someone sent me a tiny brass tube by post, the weight was negligible, it was in a standard DL envelope and had a first class stamp but was fractionally - and we are talking 2mm here, too wide.

So despite being well within the length, width and weight it was reclassified as second class and classed as a large letter - remember we are talking 2mm here - which meant it was still 8p light on postage.

Now if you are going to lumber the public with a system which seems to have been designed to confuse pensioners by an accountant with no friends you would have thought someone with a working brain might have worked out that if the first class small letter postage cost was the same as the minmum second class large letter postage cost - and so on up the scale, first the same as second on the next level up - it would save a lot of problems.

It would just mean a marginal oversize item would drop from first to second class but no that is far too simple. So I am charged 8p but not only that, because the Royal Mail management will not insure postmen to carry money, they cannot collect the 8p so they have to pop a card through your letterbox to tell you they can't deliver an item because you owe postage.

So you have to collect from the sorting office where you are also fined £1 - they call it an admin charge - for collecting a letter someone had actually paid to have delivered.

The people taking the flak for that at the sorting office of course are the postmen , who are also blamed for all the other ills of the creaking service. No wonder they are also going on strike at regular intervals which rather than militant posties in this case tends to point to incompetent management with an agenda to sell the whole shooting match off. Tradition and history mean nothing when there is a few bob to be made and a few palms to be greased.

I am old enough to remember a postcard posted in the morning being delivered in the afternoon in the days when there was no first and second class post just a pride in delivering as fast as possible.

The current management, who decided people don't want an early morning delivery, hardly seemed worried whether mail is delivered at all just as long as their political masters are happy and the seven figure salaries keep rolling in.

Anyone one else under the impression we are going to see yet another Government con when it comes to Royal Mail?

The taxpayers, that is you and me, take on the £9 billion black hole of the Royal Mail pension scheme - which is a scheme much better than the one enjoyed by the vast majority who are paying for it through their PAYE contributions - while the Government raises cash by flogging off part of Royal Mail to some foreign outfit or a bunch of hedge fund, private equity cowboys.

I might be wrong but I suspect the bit being flogged off will not include delivering Christmas cards in the Highlands of Scotland or circulars to hill farms in Wales.

In a few years time, if Britain has not been repossessed by then, the Government will point to how well the cherry picking private bit is doing against the public bit, which is the bit actually providing the service, and the stage will be set for full privatisation as the only hope for a modern postal service (i.e. limited to easily accessible addresses in reasonably well populated areas).

We have virtually no control over pricing of gas, electricity of water, no control over investment in the industries and end up with some of the most expensive utilities in Europe with people paying different rates for the same gas and electricity coming down the same pipes and wires in the same street. We have hardly any storage facilities to buy gas when it is cheap, because that costs profits, and hardly enough spare capacity to cope if we have a hard winter for the same reason. But set against that of course, we do have some of the best bonuses for executives in the industry so at least it is not all bad.

We have a free for all in telephones where no one has any idea which provider is best or cheapest, a public transport system where no one seems to be responsible for anything, trains are cancelled to make them on time and you need a degree in logic to book a ticket from A to B. There are buses of more hues than a rainbow on speed from companies who are in there with rail franchisees in making big profits and soaking up more in subsidies than British Rail and our bus services could dream about in their wildest moments.

We have a health service where private health companies are being slipped in by stealth and an education system where any form or a loony with a few bob are invited to start their own schools.

Now, after hiving off the profitable bits of the postal service under the guise of competition - the TNTs and DHLs of this world do not want to get involved with delivering Christmas cards to hill farms in Wales or crofters in the Hebrides God forbid - Lord Mandelson now proposes flogging off a large chunk to a private partner which, he claims, will be in keeping a manifesto promise to keep the postal service in state hands. For how long he does not say. I am sure it will improve profits for whichever of the former trade commissioner's European buddies wins the raffle but there is more chance of Walsall winning the Champion's League than there is of any improvement in service.

We pay more and more in taxes, employ more and more civil servants, yet hardly have a public service left when it comes to serving the public. Mandelson has sounded the death knell for Royal Mail which will go the way of all other public services and utilities with profit the priority and damn the public and the service.

I see Post Offices are under threat again with another 4,000 closures predicted on top of the 2,500 already in the pipeline. If the powers that be had their way we would end up with one post office, one pillar box and all letters would be delivered to one address by one postman on £300 a week. You can almost hear the champagne corks popping as the suits in charge celebrate their performance bonuses.

In the real world though something seems to be wrong somewhere. We flog off the railways and open up the buses to private companies whose sole objective is to make as much profit as they can and then pay them vast subsidies - £6 billion a year or so - to provide some semblance of a service.

Meanwhile Royal Mail, whose sole purpose is to provide a service, is charged by the Government with making a profit who put people in charge who see a balance sheet as some sort of holy scripture. If we can chuck money by the trainload at transport companies we don't own who are growing rich at our expense can anyone see any reason why we cannot subsidise an essential public service that we own?

The problem with accountants and businessmen who have never made anything but a profit or loss is that they can never see the cost of putting people out of work or closing offices which serve a community and in some cases are the heart of the community - they probably do not even understand the concept of community.

I have a suspicion that in the not too distant future Royal Mail will be deemed unviable and hived off to private enterprise and once more we will be paying vast subsidies to highly profitable companies to provide the service we are in the process of dismantling.

Just had to shell out £1.16 for excess postage on a late birthday card we didn't really want because it was a staggering centimetre wider than the permitted width for a letter.

As it only had a second class stamp it was 16 pence light. At least I assume it was a stamp and not a description of what has become of our postal service under Adam "why should I care I am on £1.25 million a year plus bonuses" Crozier - another Scot gaining some sort of revenge on the English by the way.

The other £1, the handling fee, presumably helps to pay for an army if men with rulers delving though postbags measuring miscreant mail.

Some of us are old enough to remember the days when a letter posted in the morning to an address in the same town might well be delivered that afternoon.

For the benefit of younger readers there used to be at least two deliveries a day