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These are tough times for believers in privatisation. The travails of the privatised water companies, particularly Thames Water, don’t need to be repeated this close to Christmas – no one wants to be put off their festive lunch with details of raw sewage pumped into rivers by over-paid executives.
And the government has already carried out its threat to renationalise the management of train operating companies in the hope that a change of ownership alone, somehow, will magically transform the level of services for passengers.
Now the focus has centred on Royal Mail.
Having hiked the price of stamps to previously unimagined levels, Royal Mail bosses are now accused of pulling a confidence trick over their long-suffering customers in an attempt to save their annual bonuses. Postal workers claim they have received verbal instructions from their managers to record undelivered parcels and letters as having been subject to “attempted delivery”, whether or not such attempts were made.
The managers in question have been careful not to leave a paper trail, which is why their instructions are delivered verbally rather than in written form. All the better for plausible deniability when, as has now happened, enraged whistle blowers reveal the unpalatable truth about an iconic and once-beloved service.
It’s a miserable, seedy tale of cynicism and greed, and hardly likely to lift spirits in a country that desperately needs an injection of optimism. With the economy faltering and little sign that our new government is making inroads into the many problems bequeathed to it by its predecessors, the last thing we needed to learn was that one of the country’s most important institutions – an institution bearing the Royal seal of approval, no less – has been degraded and devalued to the point where managerial bonuses are considered more important than honesty towards its customers.
It feels like a particularly sordid, though appropriate, Christmas parable. Had Scrooge looked inside the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come in 2024, he might find the arrogant figures of Pride and Greed, rather than the slight, pathetic creatures named Want and Ignorance that the legendary miser encountered in 1843. How did we get to a position where the Christmas postal service, so vital to communities throughout the country, have been relegated to nothing more than mechanisms for triggering managerial bonuses?
And why do such sharp practices only come to light when postal workers themselves, no doubt resentful of the damage to their own reputations, work up the courage to speak out?
Ironically, the same advances in technology that are making the economic climate for physical postal services so challenging has become the means by which this latest scam has been detected. Internet-connected “smart” doorbell systems that record video of anyone approaching a dwelling have provided ample evidence that delivery of a parcel marked “delivery inaccessible” was never actually attempted. Customers have been left scratching their heads by claims that items have had to be returned to local depots after no answer was received at their home, despite the intended recipient being there the whole time.
Changes to people’s working lives – particularly the increase in the number of people working from home – make it that much more difficult for delivery personnel, whether from Royal Mail or the many other private sector delivery companies, to claim that they had tried and failed to get your items to you.
That such behaviour is acceptable, at least to some, says much about the cost-cutting, corner-cutting, cash-centred mindset of modern business management in Britain today.
Alas, too many people will see this scandal – and it is a scandal – as an inevitable consequence of privatisation. “Public sector good, private sector bad”, as the Left-wing mantra used to go (and still does in some quarters). But to believe that would be to believe that public sector managers are somehow more honest, more worthy, better people than their counterparts in the private sector. Many of them are indeed fine people, but corruption and laziness are universal qualities that are equally and generously shared across all sectors.
No, the answer to Royal Mail’s challenges lies in better, more efficient, stronger management that will earn the confidence of its own work force as well as its customers and stakeholders in the political realm. Changing the ownership of a company changes only one thing: ownership. It does not change the culture of the organisation – only leadership can do that.
The bad must be rooted out, the bonus regime must be changed, improved or scrapped, and, above all, the company must refocus on its customers, first, second and last. Unless the current management wishes to receive some unwelcome spectral visitors in their own bed chambers on Christmas Eve night.
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