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It takes talent for a parcel-delivery company not to prosper during the current conditions, when online shopping for non-essentials is the only sort of shopping allowed. Still, the Royal Mail is making a pretty good fist of it. The world seems to be full of delivery vans, yet the former state-owned postal service has managed to shoot itself in the foot by establishing a ‘blacklist’ of 28 areas, including Leeds, Enfield and Wandsworth where the post does not seem to be getting delivered.
One resident of Ilford says she has not received a single item of post for a whole month. I’m sure she will enjoy a merry Christmas, possibly in March, when her cards and parcels finally arrive. More seriously, the Royal Mail’s feeble service is putting lives at risk as invitations to vaccine centres have disappeared down a black hole.
Yes, yes, I am sure that it can’t be easy running a sorting office in the middle of an pandemic and that there are postmen off sick or self-isolating – the excuse given by the Royal Mail. But no post for a whole month? One can almost sense the Chief Executives at Amazon, DPD and all the rest licking their lips at the prospect of enjoying the Royal Mail’s lunch.
Given that the Royal Mail still has a residual 51 percent of the parcels market, it is a very large lunch for someone to enjoy. The competition seems to have managed to keep up with deliveries against a backdrop of illness and swelling demand. I bet there is no neighbourhood in the country which hasn’t had a visit from a DPD van in the past month. So why can’t the Royal Mail deliver?
It would, of course, been easier to run sorting offices during Covid 19 had the Royal Mail done what it should have done years ago and automated the process. The company says it is investing, yet still in 2018/19 only 12 percent of its parcels were automatically-sorted and tracked. It shows just how hard it is for a former nationalised industry to change its spots.
Royal Mail might now have shareholders and a new chief executive, recruited from Ocado, on a base salary of £525,000 a year, but it has inherited working practices and a unionised staff from its days in the public sector. While the likes of Amazon, with flexible working practices, have been able to expand their workforces by scooping up out-of-work actors, waiters and the like, the Royal Mail didn’t dare to try to reconfigure its 90,000-strong workforce of postal workers in a modernisation programme it launched last year – only management jobs were affected.
It is similar to what happened in other privatised industries. Train companies were supposed to become dynamic businesses which would open up new markets and prosper through greater efficiency. They did succeed in running more trains and increasing passenger numbers, yet their unionised workforces used the threat of strikes to bid up pay to absurd levels, leaving the industry as reliant on handouts as ever.
In spite of the boom in online shopping, the Royal Mail managed to lose £20 million in the eight months to November – compared with a £61 million profit in the same period in 2019. It had better get its act together soon or it will be heading the same way as a letter posted to Ilford: oblivion.
