Royal Mail eyes PM's 800m home Covid tests contract

[POSTMAN]

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The struggling company is willing to battle Amazon for a contract it hopes could reinvent its business

Royal Mail is targeting a contract worth almost £800m to spearhead mass home testing for up to two and a half years under Boris Johnson’s “Operation Moonshot”.
Keith Williams, the chairman, wants postal workers to deliver and collect up to 200,000 home Covid testing kits a day until mid-2023.

The tender, worth between £384m and £785m, reveals home testing will play an “increasingly significant” role. It says: “The ambition of NHS Test and Trace is to ensure that everyone who needs a test in the UK has access to one.”

Royal Mail is expecting to compete with rivals including Amazon for the work. Ministers hope Operation Moonshot will allow a much greater degree of normal life to return even without a mass vaccination programme.

The contract, part of a planned escalation of the NHS Test and Trace scheme this winter, would help revive the fortunes of the 500-year-old organisation, which is under pressure from nimbler unregulated rivals, and whose decline has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Royal Mail’s bid to be at the heart of the Prime Minister’s response to the coronavirus pandemic comes as bosses remain locked in talks with leaders from the Communication Workers’ Union over reforms to outdated working practices.

Mr Williams, who brokered a peace deal with unions in his previous job at British Airways, wants to accelerate the automation of parcel sorting and use technology to more efficiently plan postal workers’ rounds.

The axing of a Saturday letters service, which will require a change in the law, and a move to seven-days-a-week parcel delivery are understood to also be under consideration as the former FTSE 100 company vies to regain ground lost to tech-focused rivals such as Amazon since its 2013 privatisation.

The Government’s testing regime has come under pressure in recent weeks amid reports testing centres have been overwhelmed by demand.

Mr Williams said: “[Moonshot] is an opportunity for Royal Mail to show what we can do after the rapid change of the postal market in 2020.

“We have challenges, but we have a fantastic opportunity here too in the growing customer demand for parcels. If we can adapt our business quickly enough, we will be well positioned to meet our customers’ demands for more and more items, to and from more people, delivered more frequently.

“If we don’t, the market will move away from us and we will be consigned to delivering a reducing volume of letters and struggling to meet demand in the growing parcels market.”

Mr Williams’ transformation ambitions received a boost this weekend as Royal Mail’s biggest investor, Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, said he “fully supports” the need for an immediate change.

Royal Mail was plunged into crisis earlier this year with the abrupt departure of boss Rico Back after less than two years in the job.

[1617mel]

ok " decline exacerbated by the pandemic" where the office i work in looks like a massive bomb of packets has decended every day, at least 3 DTD each of the last 3 weeks
out delivering until 4 o clock on thursday and friday this week , and that is leaving mail in the frames , even our managers can now see we can only cope with so much per day. Our office workers are shattered , we pushed 4 yorks to our van on thursday 2 off them full with oversized packets, we now have a larger van and have had since the pandemic started, the amount of work we are expected to do daily is staggering , and believe me im no shrinking violet , when it comes to taking the jacket off and rolling up the sleeves,and the senior managment cant see what us that go the final mile actually acheive daily, so bring on the collection at doors of the covid tests, you can add another hour to our dailly grind then! AND I DONT BUY THE NOT MAKING MONEY THEME, UNLESS THERE IS A SYPHON AND THE MONEY IS GOING THAT WAY

[redneck]

'Outdated working practices' - means that we are actually employed rather than bogus self employment. That's what needs regulating, not us. The bogus self employment is outdated, circa the Victorian era.

[oypostie]

The most outdated work practices are their management style