Sunday 12 August 2012

Sneaky goings on at the Royal Mail?

Hi followers! Sorry it has been such a long time since my last posting but life has not yet furnished me with that lottery win that will permit me to become a full time blogger!
Having a little more time than usual I will try and get up to date on the most important matters postal over the past few months, starting with.....the shocking increase in postal charges.
On 30th April, UK inland postal charges increased from 46p to 60p (a rise of 30%) for first class mail and from 36p to 50p (a rise of 39%) for second class postings. International prices fared slightly better with more modest increases between 25 - 28%. It seems that Royal Mail - or the government - had bullied the regulator Ofcom into abandoning the prescribed price limits with threats that the universal service, making daily deliveries to every address in the UK, was at risk.

Will Royal Mail profit from entering the loans and morgages market

Within two months of the rate increase, before it had any impact on revenues, the Royal Mail announces yearly profits of £211 million, a 400% increase on the previous year and earning a nice bonus of £371,000 for Chief Executive Moya Greene. Royal Mail had, over this period shed 4,000 jobs at a cost of over £70 million in redundancy and other payments. Economics is not my strong point, but something doesn't seem right here! Recent announcement have included planned reductions in collection times from some of the 115,000 postboxes nationwide and that TNT, the Dutch postal carrier, is undertaking trials with end-to-end deliveries in the London. This all suggests to me that there is some cost-cutting and 'fattening up' taking place in preparation for a large scale privatisation of the mail service. Watch this space....

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