Royal Mail peace talks resume

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Royal Mail peace talks got under way again last night in spite of union leaders' threats of longer strikes.

The negotiations are expected to continue today in an effort to resolve the dispute over jobs, pay and working conditions. Brendan Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, has been chairing the talks.

Thousands of members of the Communication Workers Union staged a 24-hour stoppage at mail centres. A small number of staff will strike today and collection and delivery workers across the country are due to come out tomorrow.

The CWU held off from announcing new strikes while behind-the-scenes contacts continued, but Billy Hayes, the union's leader, said there was "every prospect" that industrial action would be stepped up. "We will be upping the dispute. We will not be scaling it down. There is every prospect that we will increase the action and we could be looking at longer strikes," he said.

He also said the union was close to deciding whether to mount a legal challenge to Royal Mail's move to hire 30,000 agency workers to handle the backlog caused by the strikes as well as the Christmas rush.

Royal Mail has already hired 8,000 such workers and says they have helped reduce the backlog from last week's strikes to fewer than 2m letters and parcels. Mark Higson, managing director of Royal Mail Letters, was confident that mail backlogs caused by the new walk-outs would be cleared by early next week.

The two sides differed on why three days of talks at the TUC had failed to produce a breakthrough. Royal Mail said they had been close to an agreement on Tuesday night, thought to involve suspending strikes and further changes to working practices until after Christmas, while a new agreement was negotiated on modernisation and job security.

But Mr Higson said: "Early yesterday, the CWU came up with a fresh set of demands, and we considered those and we were in fact at the TUC all day. But . . . the CWU then decided to carry on calling the strikes, while those talks were in progress."

Royal Mail said the demands included guaranteed overtime for postal workers to clear the backlog and a halt to hiring temporary staff. Dave Ward, CWU chief negotiator, said it was "complete nonsense" to say there were fresh demands. He said agency staff was "not a sticking point but it is an issue".

Mr Ward said he had tabled a proposed deal at 10am on Wednesday that he thought would end the dispute, but Royal Mail had not responded by 6pm, so the union had no alternative but to strike.

"We are frustrated at the company's attitude. Frankly we don't think they want an agreement. It was a realistic proposal - if it wasn't, I am sure Royal Mail would have rejected it in five minutes instead of waiting eight hours.''

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