Ofcom Consultation on End-to-End Competition January 2013

[POSTMAN]

LTB 051/13 Ofcom Consultation on End-to-End Competition January 2013

To: All Branches with Postal Members






Dear Colleague



Ofcom Consultation on End-to-End Competition – January 2013
The purpose of this LTB is to advise CWU Branches that Ofcom has recently undertaken a further consultation covering the issue of end-to-end competition. The consultation does not deal directly with TNT’s end-to-end delivery trial in West London; instead it focuses on draft guidance on how the Regulator should assess the risk of end-to-end competition and at what point would regulatory intervention become necessary.

The background for this consultation is the notification condition imposed by Ofcom in March 2012 on potential entrants to the end-to-end market. Following this TNT UK notified Ofcom in summer 2012 of their intention to begin a trial of end-to-end competition in West London. At that time Ofcom decided not to intervene and published an update in July 2012 setting out the rationale for that decision. As part of this, Ofcom did commit to producing clearer guidance on what steps they would undertake to decide whether to intervene on end-to-end competition in future, hence the current consultation.


The CWU has made a full submission to this latest Ofcom consultation, which is available here: End-to-end submission - January 2013
http://www.cwu.org/assets/_files/docume ... -_DRAF.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


The CWU submission sets out the reasons why the Union disagrees with Ofcom’s decision not to intervene over the current threat posed by end-to-end competition and asks the Regulator to reconsider its position. The submission also responds to the specific issues in the proposed framework we believe are of concern.



The CWU believe Ofcom must take a far more robust approach to regulating end-to-end competition and that this requires intervention now. Without immediate intervention we believe that Ofcom is failing in its primary duty to safeguard the USO, as set out and strengthened in the Postal Services Act 2011.





The Ofcom consultation document also signals an important decision by the Regulator to “undertake work to determine how to assess what constitutes a reasonable rate of efficiency improvement by Royal Mail”.



The Union welcomes the debate on the relative efficiency of CWU members. We have called for an independent assessment because we believe this will demonstrate that the relative efficiency of Royal Mail employees is already high. We also want to highlight that any attempt by a Regulator to measure comparable efficiency, based on the pay and conditions of workers, is fundamentally flawed and simply encourages all employers to enter the race to the bottom.



We encourage Branches and CWU representatives to read our submission and become familiar with the arguments that the Union has put forward. These issues will also come to the fore in our wider campaign against unfair competition and privatisation. An update on the campaign will be published later this week.



Any enquiries on the content of this LTB should be addressed to the DGS (P) Department.

Yours sincerely


Dave Ward

Deputy General Secretary (P)


Billy Hayes
GeneraL Secretary