By Mike Laycock »
A LEADING councillor and former postman is calling on City of York Council to help keep hundreds of postal jobs in York.
The Press revealed recently how Royal Mail intended to stop processing second-class mail posted within the Y0 postcode area at the York Mail Centre in Leeman Road.
It said that under the move, intended to improve operational efficiency, it would transfer the work to the Leeds Mail Centre.
It said the change would not mean any job losses in York and it had “no plans at the moment” to transfer any further mail processing from York to Leeds.
But the postal workers’ union, the CWU, said it feared that first-class and other mail would move to Leeds later, meaning the closure of the York sorting office and the loss of more than 350 jobs.
Now Coun Ken King, a former branch secretary for the CWU as well as a Labour councillor for Clifton, said today he believed first-class would follow second-class to Leeds later on “as surely as day follows night.”
And he said he wanted the council to consider taking steps to pressurise the company into thinking again about its proposals for second class mail.
He said a great proportion of the council’s mail consisted of second-class letters going out to residents within the York area, for example, concerning the electoral register and council tax.
He said he had asked the council’s chief executive to look at segregating all the authority’s York-bound mail into bags which could then be presented to Royal Mail.
He said there would be no point in the letters going 25 miles to Leeds to be sorted and then travelling another 25 miles back to York for delivery, and it would be more cost-effective for Royal Mail to sort it in York.
Coun King said: “If it is necessary for a motion to go to the council, I would do that.”
He said he hoped other large organisations and businesses would follow suit and step up the pressure on Royal Mail.
However, a Royal Mail spokesman said today that any such action by the council would not have any effect on its proposals to move mail processing to Leeds.
He added that many local authorities and businesses, including City of York Council, already segregated their mail into first and second-class.