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Royal Mail privatisation
AndyW - 12/9/13 at 10:33 AM

So,

They have announced the Royal Mail is to be privatised.

Is this going to improve things, or see prices rocket and profit over service become the way?

Daddylonglegs - 12/9/13 at 10:35 AM

My vote is on the latter, same as everything else that went private

loggyboy - 12/9/13 at 10:50 AM

There are already private mail companies, so they will have to price competively or they will simply go bust.
Their are already 101 courier companies that beat royal mails parcel prices and service, so straight away they will have to sort that out. I personally think its a dead side of the business they need to concentrate on public letters and small packets only.

watsonpj - 12/9/13 at 11:36 AM

It can only get worse. The problem with the mail is they have never opereated on an even playfield with everyone else as they have had to be seen to service unprofitable/low profit areas to ensure the mail got to everyone. New companies can come in and takeover the sweet spots and don't have any such restrictions. As a private company surely they will just cut out the unprofitable bits .


Pete

bi22le - 12/9/13 at 12:04 PM

They simply wont be able to compete with a newer more correctly set up lean company. In my eyes the only people that use them now only do so becasue they dont know how the other companies operate. They charge a forture for a regular to poor service.

Irony - 12/9/13 at 12:17 PM

quote:
Originally posted by bi22le
They simply wont be able to compete with a newer more correctly set up lean company. In my eyes the only people that use them now only do so becasue they dont know how the other companies operate. They charge a forture for a regular to poor service.



Completely agree. Terrible service from Royal Mail in Lincolnshire. The main sorting office is open late only once a week and often sees queues right down the street. Yet in the daytime it's dead.

The other day I sent a parcel First Class Recorded and it cost me a fiver. 8 working days it took to arrive. When I approached Royal Mail about it after 5 days they said 'if it doesn't turn up in 28 days then you can file a missing document case'.

Sorry, not good enough.

ReMan - 12/9/13 at 12:57 PM

Going on strike, that will help the cause! Tits

snapper - 12/9/13 at 01:51 PM

Most courier companies use Royal Mail to sort and deliver unprofitable items such as bulk mail
I have a friend in Royal Mail sorting office and the pint of stuff that goes through from independant mail companies is enormous
Royal Mail could become profitable in the way BT has, by owning the infrastructure that other company's cannot afford to build
No company delivers mail to every door in the UK apart from Royal Mail, how much to deliver to the Orkneys, Outer Hebrides etc

owelly - 12/9/13 at 02:08 PM

The Royal Mail has the structure to offer a service that other companies don't. If only they would use it!!
I'd love to be able to give our posty a parcel for him to deliver if he could do it for a similar price to other couriers. Imho, most couriers fail to collect on time and often don't bother at all. If I was able to simply hand my parcels to the posty, then I'd be happy.

matt_gsxr - 12/9/13 at 02:28 PM

I think the royal mail are brilliant.
When I need a package I only have to travel 1 mile to the sorting office, the blokes who deliver are friendly and helpful.
Much better than the alternatives for customer service in my experience.

Long may it continue.

MakeEverything - 12/9/13 at 04:13 PM

quote:
Originally posted by matt_gsxr
I think the royal mail are brilliant.
When I need a package I only have to travel 1 mile to the sorting office, the blokes who deliver are friendly and helpful.
Much better than the alternatives for customer service in my experience.

Long may it continue.


Much like all these heavily unionised public sector services that are constantly in the spot light, its not the people at the sharp end that are the problem.

most of the problem seems to be (referring to knowledge of the prison service, fire service, and the majority of the BIS services as an example), these services are out of date, inefficient at the top and middle, yet keep thrashing the front line to pieces every time their targets are tightened. I say do it for a three to five year period to strip out the dead wood, then bring it back in-house as a public service.

ETA: i forgot to mention the NHS....

[Edited on 12-9-13, by MakeEverything]

britishtrident - 12/9/13 at 04:41 PM

In my area the Royal Mail is actually pretty efficient but I recognised this isn't the case throughout the UK as anything posted to London post code is doomed vanish into black hole from which it may or may not emerge. The most likely reason for this is the low quality of the work force in some innercity areas, one suspect a pre-recruitment basic english test would solve many problems.

Royal Mail suffers because they have to deliver thousands tons of bulk mail at less than cost which is past on to them from other mail services from outside the UK

For some years now successive governments have had an agenda to undermine the Royal Mail and the Post Office probably because the Royal Mail is one of the last bastions where trade unions still retain some vestige of old fashioned union power.

On the management side we have seen upper management make some pretty strange decisions, the cost of sending a small parcel is now so unreasonably high it can only have been set with the specific intention of closing down the parcel service by stealth.

The management of the Post Office counter services has a poor track both successive governments and Post Office management seem intent on destroying what used to be a national institution. An example of mismanagement was a computer system that was prone to random errors that made it appear as if sub-post offices had a shortfall in their accounting, some sub-postmaster were forced to pay five figure sums to the Post Office for money they didn't owe , some lost their homes and a few were convicted and sent to prison. The Post Office management were told many times they had a serious computer problem that needed investigation but nothing was done about it.



[Edited on 12/9/13 by britishtrident]

Simon - 12/9/13 at 05:02 PM

Look at it this way, if it goes bust and the public only owns 60% of it, it'll cost us less as taxpayers

Once it's in private hands I doubt the govt will step in to save (a bit like Tony Bliar didn't with MG R. Even though they moaned about pit closures!!!)

ATB

Simon