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Peter Hain
In sun, rain or snow, our posties deliver letters up remote mountain tracks, across the sea to islands or up dark stairs in rough city estates – addresses which private competitors do not touch with a barge pole.
A ludicrous and unfair system of promoting competition has enabled private competitors to cream off the money-making mail like pre-sorted business letters and inter-city traffic, whilst dumping costly post for outlying areas back onto the Royal Mail.
The universal service obligation – to deliver to any address anywhere for the same price – is now seriously at risk.
A colossal pension fund deficit of over £8 billion costing about £600 million each year to subsidise is crippling the business and postal workers are desperately insecure about their retirement.
Management has also been poor and industrial relations pretty awful.
But the Government’s initial reform proposals beg many more questions than they answer.
Will they legislate for a level-playing field between Royal Mail and private competitors, instead of the lop-sided one now?
How exactly can Labour’s manifesto commitment to a ‘publicly owned’ postal service (repeated by Ministers) be reconciled with a private company partner and stakeholder, albeit a minority one? Who wins? The private shareholder or the general public? And surely the minority private stake proposed opens the door to a 100 per cent stake in the future?
If the Government is to guarantee the pension fund, postal workers will very much welcome that. But surely it would also be a godsend for a new private partner since the Royal Mail would be profitable without that liability? We must not nationalise the debt and privatise the profit.
The public will not stand for the outright privatisation advocated by the Conservatives and the Liberals. People know that if pure profit was the main aim, we would soon be condemned to collect mail from boxes in town or village centres like in other countries rather than have it delivered though our front doors.
Yes the Royal Mail, once the envy of the world, has become a problem.
Change is urgently needed. But Labour has to get it right.
Guardian 23 February
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/23/post-labour
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