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Jayne Dowle: For once I agree with Mandelson – the Royal Mail really needs sorting
I CAN'T imagine the young mother in the queue cared much about who owns the Post Office.
Heavily pregnant, with a toddler clinging to her hand, she waited in line only to be told that the parcel she had struggled into town on the bus to collect couldn't be found. The clerk told her she would have to come back tomorrow. There were weary tears in her eyes as she left.
I had been standing behind her for half-an-hour, queuing for my own parcel. My husband was at home when the postman rang the doorbell, but by the time he got downstairs, the only sign of him was the familiar red-and-white card advising me to leave it 24 hours and present myself at the General Post Office between 7am and 1pm.
I had plenty of time to think as I stood in the queue. It struck me that a Christmas present ordered online in my kitchen at 11pm started out at the cutting edge of modern life, but ended up in a scene that wouldn't have been out of place outside a butcher's shop in the Second World War.
Lord Mandelson is right: the world is changing around the Royal Mail, but the Royal Mail is not changing itself.
I was so bored in that queue I composed a mental list of questions to ask the boss, should he dare to present himself to the 20 or so people snaking around the block, tutting and looking at their watches. Why does the collection office open weekdays at 7am, when most of us are busy running around getting ready for work?
Why does it close at 1pm, just as lunch-hour kicks in? Why do parcels have to be collected from a special place in the yard, and not in the main office, which doesn't close until 5.30pm?
Why isn't there a quicker system for returning parcels to the nearest branch, so the whole of Barnsley doesn't have to trail into the town centre to pick up their errant mail?
I don't think these are unrealistic expectations, do you? But I'm sure that there all kinds of operational reasons which
the boss could have given me, should he have shown his face. The only conclusion I could reach is that the Post Office appears to be run for the benefit of the people who manage it, and not for those who are compelled to use it. Opening the collection office for longer, for instance, would probably play havoc with shift patterns.
The problem is that the Post Office has found itself balanced on a precipice, torn between the roles of a public service and a sustainable business. The debate about the role of beleaguered sub-post-offices rests on this.
Anti-closure protesters say that they are a "lifeline" to the community, the place people rely on for pensions and benefits. The Prime Minister is already embroiled in a political revolt over plans to close thousands.
The main postal union is planning to strike tomorrow over mail centre closures, just in time for Christmas. So the last thing Gordon Brown needs is the Hooper Report, which describes the Royal Mail in its current form as "untenable", and warns that the universal service is under threat without modernisation. And then there is the small matter of the pension fund deficit, which is expected to reach 7bn by next spring, and which taxpayers might be asked to fund on behalf of the Treasury.
Oh dear. And there is the Labour Government, with its manifesto pledge not to privatise the Royal Mail, stuck in a right old quandary.
If that wasn't bad enough, the massively controversial issue
of a foreign investor is at stake, with the Dutch firm TNT as frontrunner potentially taking a substantial stake in the
Royal Mail.
Well, let's be honest here. Like that young mother in the queue, most of us won't actually worry who owns the Post Office, or how the sums add up, as long as two conditions are met. We get a modern, efficient postal service that fulfils our expectations, and we don't have to keep on dipping into our own purses to bail it out.
I realise that this makes me sound dangerously like Lord Mandelson, a situation I never expected to find myself in. But, frankly, the Royal Mail has been trying to sort itself out for at least a decade, and so far the only progress I can see is the invention of a website that doesn't even give you the direct telephone number for your nearest office, and a home delivery which has (progressively) got later and later in the day.
I don't want to see post office workers lose their jobs because of privatisation. But I do want to see decisive action from a government which can find the wherewithal to nationalise banks and building societies, but which has shied away – so far –from getting to grips with tackling a service which all of us rely on. This time, it simply has to deliver the goods.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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