It amazes me that the following points were on the BBC News website, but hardly mentioned on the main news.
I never realised the Pension Defecit has been halved this year!!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13765645
Operating profit, including the costs of modernisation changes, was £39m in 2010, down from £180m in 2009, the group said.
It has invested £400m in the modernisation process in the past financial year.
It has also been announced that Moya Greene has been paid £637,000 in the nine months since she took on the job.
Those payments are made up of £350,000 in salary, a performance bonus of £142,000 and other benefits of £145,000, which includes payments to cover the cost of her relocating from Canada.
Royal Mail expects to close up to 20 mail centres over the next five years. Each one can employ about 1,000 people. Jobs will also go at delivery offices as new sorting machinery is introduced.
This will all be in addition to the 45,000 jobs which have gone from the UK letters and parcels business over the last five years, reducing the total number of staff to about 163,000.
The size of the pension fund deficit has however, almost halved, from £8bn in 2010 to £4.5bn in 2011. Royal Mail said it had paid £771m into the pension fund during the financial year.
The drop in liabilities is largely due to the government's plan to change the inflation measure used to calculate pensions from RPI to the typically lower CPI.
Meanwhile the government is proceeding with plans to sell or privatise Royal Mail. The Postal Services Act received royal assent this week.
The change in regulation will allow the government to take on the pension burden and for the potential sale or privatisation of the business.
