John Kampfner :: author, broadcaster & commentator

How the Post Office is being stamped out
Daily Express, 2nd November 2004

A decade ago, when I lived in Moscow, the expatriates had a system called ‘hand carrying’. Anyone taking a flight out anywhere abroad would ring around offering to take any letters or parcels that needed to be posted onwards – anywhere, to the UK, US, France ... even to Ouagadougou. This was the ultimate co-operative venture. We did it knowing that the following week we would be grateful if someone else returned the favour. We did knowing that if we put our correspondence in the ordinary Russian post it would almost never get to its destination. It would either be stolen or mislaid.

Things have got a bit better there. By contrast, we in Britain are beginning to resemble the life in Russia of old. I was talking to my local bank a few weeks ago, requesting a replacement debit card. The man said that we must be on the lookout for the package when it arrived. It would come in an unmarked brown envelope. Anything with the bank’s logo would be nicked somewhere along the way, so they had given up identifying their own letters. If that failed, he said, he would send it by courier.

What a disgrace. What a state of affairs. Our once beloved postal service is in seemingly terminal decline. We thought that the closure of thousands of smaller post office in towns and villages across the land was bad enough. Not we are told that some of the big showcase buildings, in our city centres, may also face the axe. The reason? Loads of money can be made by selling off prime property, and in any case usage levels are not what they were.

There may be several legitimate reasons why we no longer rely on our post offices the way we used to. Technology is one. Many welfare benefits and other payments can now be sent directly into bank accounts, for those who have them. We can buy stamps at any high street shop or corner newsagent. We can apply for driver’s licences, television licences and passports on the internet. As for sending letters, many people, particularly younger generations can barely remember the last time they sent a personal letter through the post. Email has taken over where the telephone left off in terms of social communication.

But there is another reason as well. We have lost confidence in a national institution that once made us proud. Our post offices have gone to rack and ruin – although I accept that as part of the “restructuring” of the past couple of years many have been modernised. Our mail delivery service has become slow, haphazard, unreliable and prone to theft. This is not part of some inevitable global social change. This is a particularly British phenomenon – not respecting our major state institutions. The postal services in France, Germany and other developed countries are not like that. Their buildings are clean. Their letters tend to arrive on time.

It would be unfair to pin all the blame on particular individuals or groups. Successive governments have failed to invest and failed to give direction. The unions have often taken a lamentably short-term view, believing that strikes and wildcat industrial action serves their interests in preserving jobs and improving pay and conditions. In the long term it does neither.

As for the management, considerable hopes were invested in the two men brought in from the private sector to sort the place out. Allan Leighton, the chairman, was handpicked by Tony Blair after transforming the supermarket chain Asda from a £500million company to one sold to US giant Wal-Mart for £6.2 billion in 1999. Adam Crozier, the chief executive, came to prominence as head of the Football Association where he mounted a full-frontal assault on the outdated practices of the FA, only to be forced out by reactionary elements in the organisation. When they arrived at the Royal Mail, they pledged radical change. Crozier described his new task as bringing about "the biggest corporate turnaround programme in the UK."

Changes have been made, aplenty, but are customers being better served? The second delivery, an outmoded concept, was correctly withdrawn, but have consumers been compensated with Sunday deliveries? Has reliability improved?

So far, one in eight urban post offices has closed. The number now stands at 7753, down from over 9000 two years ago. The government was forced to intervene to preserve some rural post offices, although others have shut down. The people who suffer tend to be the most vulnerable, particularly the elderly, who may not have their own transport to take them the several miles they now need to go to pick up their pensions. At the same time as the closures, some 30,000 redundancies were announced of postal workers.

All the while management (admittedly the previous lot) wasted millions from changing the Royal Mail’s name into the absurd sounding Consignia, and only for the new lot to change it back again. A year ago, before the last series of strikes, the management said it was pleased to be losing "just" £750,000 a day, down from £1.2million before. The hope then was to break even, or even turn in a small profit, by the end of 2003. That did not happen, although losses are now “only” £70 million a year.

That is the reason for the latest batch of closures, news of which was apparently leaked by the unions. The Royal Mail admits that it is planning to shut down, move or sell off a number of the 560 Crown Post Offices across the UK, those on prestige sites, but it disputes the numbers claimed. “Discussions are ongoing and options include closures and offering local business people the chance to take over the offices,” a spokesman said. Franchising deals could involve supermarkets or other shops providing post office counters, as already happens in smaller offices. The unions accuse management of asset stripping, pure and simple, hiving off buildings in order to improve profits.

The idea is not necessarily wrong in itself. If considerable sums can be made by divesting the Royal Mail of a few post offices in especially prime locations, then so be it. The problem, however, is more fundamental than that. We in Britain have become fixated by management consultants’ obsessions with “downsizing”, cutting jobs and services and concentrating only on parts of companies that are cash cows. We desperately need a postal service that is efficient, well-run and profitable. We also need one that is large and prestigious, and does what it is supposed to do – serve the people.

This article first appeared in the Daily Express and may not be reproduced without permission.