Harry Phibbs
I still haven't sent out my Christmas cards and never have I been less confident about them reaching their intended recipients if I do get round to it.
Of course I will be sending them via Royal Mail as I have no choice. (As an old fashioned sentimentalist I somehow don't feel that the internet e-card is quite the same.) Yet for those sending out rather larger volumes at greater regularity the choice is increasingly to go elsewhere.
A Royal Mail post van struggles through the snow
Struggling the last mile: Rival companies sort many letters and parcels - but rely on Royal Mail to do the tough part of delivering the post
Already a third of letters are handled by rivals of Royal Mail. The exodus from the Royal Mail has been accelerating and so it is anticipated that within a couple of years they will only handle a minority of the post. At present the final delivery is still carried out by postmen but TNT are keen to carry out their own deliveries and so be responsible for all stages of the operation.
But private individuals posting our humble personal letters will still be stuck with the Royal Mail. I used to have a natural optimism that once I had posted a letter I knew it would arrive at its destination.
The philosopher Roger Scruton reckons there is something about the pillar box itself which generates this trust. ‘The English “pillar-box” has a permanent air,’ Scruton wrote a few years ago. ‘Its base and cornice, its solid cast-iron structure, and its open mouth emphasized by moldings are, from the point of view of the functionalist architect, entirely superfluous, a waste of labour and materials, which could not be justified by the box’s use.
'In fact, however, they are precisely what is necessary to create confidence in the national post office: placing your letters in such a box, through such a decisive aperture, you feel that they are in safe hands and already on their way to their destination.’
These days, however reassuring their street furniture might look I simply don't feel Royal Mail can be trusted. The strikes this year were so frequent they seemed to blur into one another. But even on the days they were working I often would get post clearly addressed to other houses in my street.
As a business the Royal Mail is a basket case. It is starved on the capital it needs as it remains under the dead hand of state ownership. It has a huge pensions deficit estimated at £10 billion. It has been reported that they will sell their £85 million stake in Camelot which will help a bit but still leave a huge gap.
Compared to international competitors the business has been slow to change and the unions, with a kind of death wish, have been fighting any change at all. The latest figures showed it making an operating profit but they did not include the main impact of the strikes. And those profits are wiped out by funding the pensions deficit.
To be fair there has been some effort by the management to move into the real world. Some tough decisions have been made to reduce over-manning. New technology is finally being slowly brought into the sorting offices which might even mean some of us can expect our post to arrive before lunch time.Some might say this decline is inevitable as so many of us now use email. But the internet has also created new opportunities for postal businesses. Rather than throw stuff away that we don't need we can sell it via Ebay - usually posting it to the buyer. In a similar way we can sell old books via Amazon. This is not only a way of making money but also becoming environmental heroes by avoiding landfill.
So there is nothing inevitable about Royal Mail's declining share of the business. Nor have we ceased to need to post things to each other. The problem is the attitude of the Communications Workers Union. While they pay lip service to modernisation in their actions they demonstrate the fatal, ‘stop the world I want to get off’-style Luddism indicative of the trade union movement at its worst. Management must also take some of the blame for giving in to this for so long.
It is still not too late for Royal Mail to break with this self fulfilling failure. But there will need to be some tough New Year’s resolutions adhered to for management and unions if a revival in fortunes will take place.
with war monger Hitler running amok in Europe at the time .