The Guardian has this headline this morning:
Staggering, isn't it, that something considered a universal public necessity for more than 180 years is now reduced to the risk of insolvency by being privatised.
Could it be that alongside water, electricity, gas, buses, trains and essential telecoms, the mail service needs to be nationalised to guarantee that such basic public services might continue to exist?
Should basic public services on which we all depend be nationalised?
- Yes (93%, 1,221 Votes)
- No (4%, 48 Votes)
- Maybe (2%, 25 Votes)
- I abstain, but show me the answers anyway (1%, 17 Votes)
Total Voters: 1,311
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‘Staggering’ is not the word I would I have used. I am outraged to be honest
Many voters have no idea that privatisation is based on debt and the priorities of those who provide the cash.
Royal Mail had its most profitable operations cherry picked off by the private sector in the name of efficiency before it was privatised. It was sold as a table with 3 legs anyway.
Privatisation simply does not work for society. You can bring it all back for me but which politicians advocate that ?
Ones expelled from Labour.
> It was sold as a table with 3 legs anyway.
Three-legged tables don’t rock…
Depends on where the legs are
Another catastrophic failure of Liberal Democrat involvement with the Cameron/Osborne government.
As I sat yesterday waiting for the 4th white van to show up with a frazzled driver lobbing a parcel over my fence I had a brilliant idea!
How about combining them all? Load all my deliveries into one van to be delivered all at once to save me time and the planet from excessive pollution – I think I could make my fortune. I was also thinking that white is such dull colour and that I would paint the vans red; I might even try and get our new king to endorse it with the title “Royal”… and since it is in some sense a physical version of E-mail I have hit upon a the title of the service “Royal Mail”.
It’s official I AM a genius and this time next year I will be a millionaire!
The world is changing and delivery requirements for all sorts of things are changing. However, allowing the “market” to drive this with “competition” determining how things happen is nonsense. Increasing your market share is driven by price (assuming some basic competence)…. and that is driven by cutting terms and conditions of those doing the delivering. Rather than asking “why can’t Royal Mail compete?” we should ask “why can Yodel (other delivery firms are available) undercut?”
🙂
Could even have a post office bank. Call it Girobank?
Indeed….
At some point in the future, maybe 20-30 years if we last that long, any of us still around will be able to tell young people about Cash.
Tell them that nobody could pry on their expenditure, their location, their habits and you didn’t have to keep loading utterly pointless Apps on to your phone just to survive and they won’t believe you.
Or even have one organisation installing our broadband and mobile networks. As is the case in most sensible countries. Instead of multiple organisations, duplicating, taking it in turns to dig up roads, neglecting rural areas.
Though Im old enough to have been trying to build IT networks across the country when it was Post Office Telecoms and they were pretty grim to deal with.
So we have to do better than that
And better than Openreach
Blame could also be laid at the table of Blair’s government as he was the one who decided to break up RM monopoly and and allow competitors to check pick the nice bits while using RM to deliver the final mile for pennies.
Living in a rural area it is totally crazy how many different courier vans deliver to our village each day. And unlike our brilliant local postie who knows all the quirks of our addresses they frequently get lost and look stressed. One nationalised service would be so much cheaper, better for the environment and infinitely better for the workers.
I so agree
It should be allowed to go bust – if It can’t survive and make profit in the private sector, then it should go out of business. Then the government can buy it back for £1 and nationalise it.
LonM, the government doesn’t need to buy it back. The government is owner of last resort, as it is with the railways. Unfortunately, if it starts making profit again the government will sell it again, even if it’s a Starmer government by then. Don’t forget to buy some stamps before the end of the month, when they go up again.
Royal Mail, with the help of extra demand during the Covid pandemic, made operating profits of £416m as recently as the financial year that ended in March 2022.uch of that went to shareholders and executive pay.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/27/royal-mail-bosses-threaten-to-declare-insolvency-as-pay-talks-near-collapse
This threatened insolvency is all part of the plan to sell off Royal Mail, and turn it into another Amazon lookalike parcel deliverer.
It is already no longer the Royal Mail (est. 1516) but has been renamed International Distributions Services plc.
The CWU deserves our full support in their strike action, which, like the NHS strikes, is as much about public service, as it is about jobs and pay.
It’s your postie we’re talking about.
https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/royal-mail
I imagine it will be discussed Thursday lunchtime at weownit., along with the buses and the NHS.
…and on privatisation of the NHS, the plan to sell our medical data to US spy company, Palantir may be of interest…
https://actionnetwork.org/events/palantir-is-coming-for-our-health-data-what-you-need-to-know?link_id=1&can_id=956ed2311bf0543eda75f20c7e18452b&source=email-event-palantir-is-coming-for-our-nhs-health-data&email_referrer=email_1862205&email_subject=event-palantir-is-coming-for-our-nhs-health-data
It is worth noting that immediately prior to privatisation the Royal Mail Group Pension Fund had in excess of £20 billion in gilts as security. RMG was also making £3-500 million profit per year. It was profitable and public service was at an all time high.
RMG was also one of the largest property owners in the U.K. as it owned a large percentage of the land where it’s offices were sited, usually in prominent city centre locations.
By privatising RMG the coalition government took control and had access to the £20 billion reserves in the pension fund, to use for tax cuts prior to 2016 election. This was the real reason that RMG was privatised. The land that RMG owned at the time of privatisation was worth more than what the business was eventually valued at and sold for.
However, in order to get their hands on the pension funds the government had to legally guarantee to pay staff pensions, for those who were in the pension fund prior to privatisation. This costs the government approximately £1 billion per year in pension payments, every single year, regardless of the fact that the business is now privatised.
IDS (the parent name of Royal Mail Group) have no interest in Royal Mail Letters (RML) due to declining volumes and the cost of maintaining the Universal Service Obligation. They have already approached the regulator regarding the relaxation of the USO and I believe will use the decision to justify why RM letters will fail into administration. Do you not think that they would be happy for that part of the business to be renationalised?
It is also worth noting that the major shareholder in IDS has just increased their share in the business to 24%.
If RM letters are to fail into administration and be renationalised then it is my belief is that it should be the whole IDS group, which includes parcels and GLS, which are the profitable parts of the business. (GLS are a European parcels/logistics business that Royal Mail Group had acquired before privatisation)
There is no doubt that the letters part of the business is a declining industry, however the profits from GLS and parcels (Parcelforce) would be able to subsidise the letters market, otherwise the tax payer will pick up the tab for the failings of the current management structure of IDS, but also remembering that the tax payer is current paying approximately £1 billion per annum in pension payments for the employees of what is a private company.
Thanks
I currently am not getting a 6 day delivery and I live in the centre of a town. It also used to have a fine Victorian substantial building as its main post office which was sold off and is now a Costa coffee place. The main post office was relocated into the back of a shop, that then closed down. Eventually it was replaced by a CO-OP that has now also closed down and the post office service with it.. There are now just 2 small PO counters in 2 other shops. A story I believe can be replicated many times over.
Indeed….right here in Ely, where I live
Of course they want to declare insolvency. All the current owners have ever wanted to do with Royal Mail is strip it of its assets. They’ve never had any ontention of running it as a differentiated service.
All the ‘Reforms’ that were the cause of these disputes were merely intended to make the business appealing to a buyer, who would then close it down anyway for the assets. After all, once you’re exactly the same as Yodel, Hermes and all the others, what’s the point in continuing with the business? Insolvency just gives them a short cut to that end.
It would be a big thing for a quoted company to do…..
Osborne and his chums get rich, the rest of us now face the loss of a vital service. Where’s the accountability? Politically there is none, and so increasingly I feel insurrection surely cannot be far away. It’s concerning and presents its own problems but what else is there to do?
Labour was involved in this one….
You are right, that Labour also tried to privatise Royal Mail, but backed off as CWU & UNITE (which was RMG managers union) were financially both big backers of The Labour Party. The real architect of this particular privatisation was Vince Cable, who had long spoken about privatising The Royal Mail
All three major parties involved then, and this is why insurrection’s a problem – when the dust settles what do we replace politics with? Time to get our thinking caps on… or try fasting for clarity of thought, or start chugging the ol’ ayahuasca…
According to weownit, the main shareholder in Royal Mail is a Czech billionaire. He owns 25% of the shares.
For most of her working life my sister worked in the main post office in Hull. When that was close she was moved to another but smaller post office in central Hull.
Then that office was closed down and the post office moved into WHSmith’s. All the staff took redundancy as they were not going to work for reduced pay. They were offered contracts on shop workers pay instead of Post Office pay.
In the village I live in now, the Post Office was in the paper shop. A few years ago the Post Office requested that it was to be kept open until the shop closed, 10.00pm.
The owner said no and the Post Office was moved into the Spar when the owner said he would keep it open all the hours the shop was open. Now the post office is only open from 9.00 to 5.00 Monday to Friday and Saturday 9.00 to 1.00. Again, only shop workers on shop workers pay. No dedicated PO staff.
Can it get worse?
There is no argument that the Royal Mail should be state run, it provides an essential public service and is vital to national security, we can not depend on an overseas owned company to always operate in the best interests of UK citizens.
I do think that the current owners want to keep the name but give back the letter delivery part of the business to the state to fund it. Just another example of assets stripping, similar to selling off the gas production side of British Gas after it was privatised.
Royal Mail and Post Office Limited are separate companies as it is, so I don’t understand what you mean.
The Mongol empire had a very efficient postal service, the Yam, way back in the fourteenth century. It was regarded as an integral part of the state, and was also seen as a way of encouraging commerce. The service was modelled on previous Chinese postal services, but, unlike them, it was not reserved for state, military and aristocratic users: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yam_(route) .
It was very heavily subsidised. At first it was free to use if the mail was sent from and picked up at a relay station. Later non-state actors were charged a fee to discourage “trivial” uses such as sending love letters, but it is doubtful that the fees ever covered the cost of the service. Indeed the very idea that it should make a profit would have seemed absurd at the time.
I echo all the comments made by Chris. The GLS parcels business is a strong cash generator and has self employed drivers as a key part of its business model in common with many other parcel operators.Management would like to unload the declining letters operation with its unionised workforce trying to protect decent wages and benefits. DHL in Germany has 600,000 post workers and is still partly owned by the government. It has had some success integrating letters and parcels to mitigate the decline in letter volume. The RMG business model has been hollowed out by deregulation and upstream private cherry picking. I fear the worst for the RMG letters.
Interestingly enough, we’re just signing up to a new service with the Royal Mail (our small family business sends thousands of packages a year through them to the UK and overseas). Our RM account manager has offered us a deal so that we’re paying just a small amount more for the more ‘premium’ Tracked 24 service (which includes Sunday delivery) than we would be paying for the Royal Mail 48 service (the business account equivalent of 2nd Class) following the next tranche of price rises which take place at the start of next week.
It’s a win for us (and I suspect many other businesses) but it shows to me just how much they are pushing to become a parcel company. The Royal Mail are also changing their International Tracked and Signed services to allow packages up to 30kg to be sent to most developed countries and the prices for many will massively undercut the other courier services (and, indeed, Parcelforce). I’m assuming they are going to lump in these new larger specials in together with the Parcelforce packages, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it ended up being a complete shambles!
On the one hand, offering a better service (the Tracked 24) is easily possible due to new technology, with little more than a tweak of their systems, but on the other hand trying to force the staff to accept onerous new terms and working conditions seems an odd way to go about actually delivering the better service.
As a long-standing mail order business, we used to receive 2 postal deliveries a day, the first arriving around 8am. We now receive letter deliveries perhaps 4 days a week and rarely much before 10am. This is understandable to some degree, given that many orders are now placed online, but there is no doubt that the packages take priority during busy periods and it is quite commonplace for even First Class letters sent by customers to take a week to be delivered at busy periods of the year.
As for the Royal Mail management, they are clearly utterly clueless. Complaining about the Unions just a couple of months after the RM succumbed to a cyber attack which made it impossible to send overseas mail for literally weeks really takes the biscuit. Some of their international services have been misconfigured for well over a year and I reported these issues and discussed it with somebody within the international team a long time ago. Nothing has been done. Not a surprise at all that they should be vulnerable to a ransomware attack.
I should mention that it’s not just the Royal Mail with problems. DPD (owned by La Poste) were dismal before Christmas and we were pleased we moved away from them last summer. We’ve heard from their former drivers (who moved to other courier services) how terribly they were treated. DHL (owned by Deutsche Post) is better business but prohibitively expensive for overseas packages. The less said about Hermes/Evri, the better and we all know the ‘Amazonians’, as we call them, have poor working conditions.
If the people running the Royal Mail had brains, they would be treating the number of posties they have due to the universal service obligation as a basis to take a big chunk of the courier service market away from the private companies. The sheer number of delivery offices and sorting offices across the country plus the number of postal workers are something that the courier services can’t compete with and the Royal Mail should be leveraging these assets to provide a service which ‘eats the lunch’ of everyone else, so to speak.
Thanks
I found out my dear mother bought into the IPO, I managed to get her out at the peak after the covid parcel boom.
My priority for nationalisation is 1) water 2) energy 3) transport. Only then would I consider a mail service
Not all water is in private hands. Scottish water was never privatised. I pay a flat water rate in my council tax.
This is because civil society got up a campaign against it and those running Scotland then took fright. The campaign didn’t really get off the ground, it was just the threat of it and the wide support it was getting.
There’s a lesson in there England and Wales.
It has been the case that a summons sent by Royal Mail is assumed to have been delivered. What will happen after RM goes?
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2023/03/27/post-office-workers-should-be-proud-following-big-pay-dispute-development-with-cwu/
Hopefully post office deliveries should improve after next weekend. They seem to have got a decent payrise.
Unfortunately the RM dispute is still ongoing.