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Oligarch, many Nottinghamshire miners carried on working during the 1984 strike when Thatcher was demolishing the mining industry.
They aren’t a pain they make more profit from a 1c letter than they do from a 2c letter and would do at much lower pricing levels for 1c items. Moving to a single priced service with delivery within 2-3 days would result in them losing far more traffic to by pass operators, especially on local to local streams.
The bizarre strategy of widening the gap between 1st class and 2nd class prices, thereby discouraging 2c customers from trading up and incentivising 1c customers to trade down, goes on with the end result that consumer and SME letters are even less profitable. Madness.
“AS. Yes, they bought 33% in a small company called Character Limited. As, you say all around online pharmacy. Certainly think it is an opportunity but you have to get it right and there has to be someone in the NHS/pharmacy/customer chain prepared to bear the delivery charges.
https://charac.co.uk/local-to-local-royal-mail/“
It is a model that plays to Royal Mail’s strengths of being able to do collection to delivery on a hyper local basis. Lots of small pharmacies try to provide these services in house to defend their business against the likes of Pharmacy2U, outsourcing to Royal Mail makes a lot of sense and will probably save them money too.
A good move and it’s good to see Royal Mail’s health division getting traction. Repeat prescriptions are issued in huge and growing volumes.
“Anyway on to today's conference call. All managers were warned, not to put any paperwork up regarding tracks taking preference ,and were told that if any of them ,forwarded any information, regarding preferential treatment for parcels , to the parliamentary select Committee or Ofcom there would be serious consequences. Looks like those at the top will never learn. To say the managers aren't happy is an understatement. Maybe they shouldn't have taken the 30 pieces of silver on offer.”
If this is the case it makes a mockery of their whistle blowing policy and Royal Mail has been fined in the past for discriminating against an employer for whistle blowing.
“Derek - Your estimates are way off there.
As a postie are you really trying to tell us that effectively for every 3 parcels or packets you deliver you also deliver 2 periodical/magazine publications!??
Utter tosh.
My estimate would be I probably delivered ONE periodical/magazine for every 40 or 50 parcels I delivered.
And that's delivering in a rural area that had a high proportion of retirees and OAP's so probably more likely to still have actual printed magazines delivered compared to the general population who more likely opt for online subscriptions.”
The last time I saw any data on the subject Royal Mail was delivering about 960million magazines per annum, it currently claims to deliver about £1.5bn parcels.
When I managed an area with 16 delivery offices I clearly remember some offices in my area being swamped with magazines while others had very few. It was heavily down to demographics and socio-economic factors. If you don’t see many magazines perhaps you have a younger less affluent customer base.
Mike the Periodical Publishers Association represents almost every magazine publisher in the U.K. They represent around 300 businesses with combined sales of nearly £4bn per annum. They print, circulate and sell 40 million magazines to U.K. consumers each month. ON a rough estimate I would think their members generates delivery volumes equivalent to about 2/3rds of those generated by Royal Mail’s entire parcel customer base.
“@DR - yes its being painted as T&C's by dodgy dave but in reality its just a money grab, lets be frank, its across the board no matter how you try and justifiy it, what all the unions and strikers are short sighted, you are only baking in the inflation with OTT pay demands, not against a pay rise but trying to keep it with inflatioin only means inflation isnt going to come down and you will be worse off in long run.
Who ever the regulator is one would think they are regulated to? answers on post card”
Sorry I have no idea what your final question means. As for inflation, in very simple terms inflation is caused by suppliers increasing prices to consumers, this can of course be driven by excessive wage increases pushing up prices. However if you look at where prices have been at the fastest rates in the U.K. it is quite clear that they aren’t cost of labour driven, they are driven by companies and now financial services companies driving up prices and interest rates to maximise profits at the expense of consumers.
The wider public is being screwed to fuel the greed of the few with the blame being shunted on to the many who actually do the work for daring to ask for pay rises that will allow them to have a marginally lower standard of living rather than full on poverty.
Anglia Water increasing its prices by 10.7% after delivering a terrible service, pumping raw sewage into beaches and paying a big dividend to shareholders is driving up inflation in a far more significant way than nurses and posties asking for a pay increase to keep somewhere close to parity with past living standards.
Mike aid “Anyone with even a vague understanding of the business can clearly see the 6 day letters USO is now an utterly pointless, inefficient and unsustainable anachronism.”
Meanwhile the Periodical Publishers Association, whose members are significant users of postal services called on Government in November last year to prevent Royal Mail dropping the 6th day delivery on a Saturday.
https://ppa.co.uk/ppa-calls-on-government-to-prevent-royal-mail-abandoning-saturday-letter-deliveries
“@DR - total rubbish your spouting ole boy, its across all industries, unless the goverment feel singling out RM i would say they have a pretty good argument in court.......”
The Government isn’t involved, the Regulator will impose the fines and in the past they have rejected any attempt by Royal Mail to claim industrial action amongst its own staff as a mitigating factor when Q of S targets have been failed. If RM felt there was a case that would stand up in court they would have used it by now. There isn’t because the strike action is a direct consequence of decisions RM Management have made over how much they pay their employees and what the associated T&Cs are.
“DerekR. Are you saying IA has never been accepted as a mitigating factor? I am only going from very distant memory (I am thinking late eighties / early nineties) as thankfully major disruption like 18 days are rare. Of course, if the business is fined it just makes investment/pay rises more difficult. I accept that there is unlikely to be any dividends for the next couple of years. Yep, poor decisions if only everybody got them right all the time.”
Not sure why you think the 1980s and 1990s are relevant here. The regime which involves Ofcom levying fines on Royal Mail for failing it’s targets came in with the Postal Services Act 2001. Neither Postcom and Ofcom have accepted industrial action by Royal Mail’s own staff as a mitigating factor at any stage since then, despite RMG trying to claim it on occasions.
The rationale being that management of industrial relations is something that is entirely within the control of the company so it doesn’t meet force majeure type conditions in the same way as an external strike that affected RM’s ability to hit targets might.
It is difficult to envisage Royal Mail escaping significant fines failing Quality of Service targets and Ofcom will no doubt take reference to the findings uncovered by these proceedings when deciding the level of fines.
Some people seem to think that the impact of strike action on Quality of Service can be used as a mitigating argument by Royal Mail. Previous attempts to use the argument that strike action was outside of the control of the company and should be treated as exceptional events have been rejected. The fines for failure in 2022/23 are likely to be at record levels. Another cost of poor decisions by this management,
Sid, it is a legal requirement for industrial action ballots involving more than 50 members to be conducted by independent scrutinisers. The CWU used to use then Electoral Reform Society. I’m not sure if this is still the case but the will have used a recognised independent scrutineer.
Sorry Oligarch you lost me there. Why would we have been worse off in the pandemic or in relations with Russia as members of the EU ? The UK used to dominate the EMA so you can’t be talking about vaccines, and the EU isn’t a military organisation so it can’t be anything to do with the fact that we had our pants down when the Russian’s invaded a country we had signed up to ensure security for.
Oligarch I’m not sure why Jubilee Mail Centre is affected but the other five sites are all involved in handling cross border Mail which and will have systems updated to handle post Brexit customs changes. This is pure conjecture but the timescales suggest another benefit of Brexit mighty have come to fruition !
I may be wrong but I seem to recall the whole WAND project which saw the closure of multiple Offices of Exchange to concentrate the work into HWDC cost about £250m. Even allowing for inflation £100m on repairing the IT system is a huge hit on the profitable of RM’s international arm.
JB and Oligarch the requirement for Royal Mail as the Designated Universal Service Provider to offer a D+1 (1st Class) Service is set out in DUSP 1.6.1 (a)
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/8351/dusp1.pdf
“ Mr Williams said: “We've now got all the accountants and lawyers on the front line delivering post.”
At this time of year every year I can remember head office staff,,including accountants and lawyers, have worked in front line operations. There is nothing special about this. I pity any of them who end up manning callers offices given the mess the Delivery Offices must be in.
@Jimmy @So an online food company that only sells perishable food deserves what it gets for being so stupid is your final response? Wow!
You have a narrow minded view on society.”
Royal Mail doesn’t and never has offered a delivery service for products that require cold chain carriage, it doesn’t do chilled and it’s doesn’t suggest guaranteed time band delivery for perishable products.
If you are trying to cut costs by using services that don’t offer what you have offered your customers you deserve to lose business to your more reputable competitors.
“@Derek "Redceo I didn’t report Jimmy’s post,"
If that's the case someone else presumably did, it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
I shan't respond to your other comments as they are rather childish and certainly not in keeping with your professed standards.“
OK so I’ll take it that you think Jimmy Riddle’s private research has more credibility than that of accredited research companies who are professionals are what they do as a business. Ignorance rules !