Another tradition – dying out post haste

Nov 30 2007 by Valerie Hill, Liverpool Daily Post

TWO postal deliveries before lunchtime? It seems like a Utopian dream, yet it was a reality for most of the country’s households and businesses until a couple of years ago.

Along with newspaper boys, red telephone boxes and a belief in full employment we took it for granted.

Wherever I’ve lived, in North and South, our postmen and women delivering the mail have always been a credit to the service.

Like the milkmen, they make up those quiet, unsung human threads that bind communities together.

Not only do they deliver the mail, they act as an early- warning system for those in trouble by knowing the residents on their patch so well.

There is the apparently true story of the Royal Engineer, serving overseas, who wrote to his girlfriend back home some 200 letters a week. She ended up marrying the postman.

For the rest of us, however, there is worse news on the postal front. It follows the downward trajectory of many other public services wanting to save money, while paradoxically still generating big bonuses for its top managers.

Having softened us up with ever later postal deliveries, Postcomm, the postal watchdog (which I thought was at least partly on our side) has allowed Royal Mail to scrap traditional morning deliveries.

This move was quietly given the go-ahead by Postcomm in spite of fierce opposition to the changes. It also failed to give a public statement on why it approved the scheme.

In an all too modern move, Postcomm can claim it made a public notification – but buried the bad news on its own website.

Even I’m not sad enough to cruise such websites in my so-called spare time looking for evidence of surreptitious curtailment to postal services.

Are you worried? If so, it’s probably too late. Royal Mail is already phasing in the scheme in which 60% of daily post will be delivered after mid-day. The first deliveries will not start until 10.30am.

For those of you who, like me, now never expect to receive mail before leaving for work, it is salutary to recall that traditionally postal deliveries started at 7.30am, with 94.4% of mail reaching its destination by noon.

It mirrors the quiet removal a couple of years ago of all postal collection time details from mailboxes with just one final clearing-out time.

In order to prepare itself for the big slow-down, Royal Mail is putting back delivery times by one hour in order to take the strain of Christmas.

Also, in a supreme piece of convenient timing, Royal Mail claims the changes are essential as a new EU green directive to cut fuel emissions will mean cutting the speed of night-time lorries that criss-cross Britain.

Isn’t it amazing how EU regulations which are supposed to be for our benefit invariably seem to be deployed to make things worse?

And, hang on, wasn’t all the switch from rail to road for long-distance post deliveries done in the name of economy and efficiency?

How curious that this all fits into a wider cost-slashing initiative which will see 40,000 of the workforce turfed out and overtime payments reduced.

In response, Post.comm has merely come up with the mealy-mouthed announcement that while it’s “concerned with the impact later delivery times can have on some postal users, there is not enough evidence to justify a regulatory intervention at the present time”.

What on earth do the managers and staff of Post.comm actually do? On this evidence, they presumably wear themselves out watching the mail service get worse.

Defending the poor, abused Royal Mail users is the consumer body Postwatch, which regards these moves as heralding the reduction of standards of service.

It is with some relief to hear a Postwatch spokesman actually speak what sounds like the truth, when he said: “This is one of the only industries where things seem to be going backwards.

“We feel that customers are paying more for less of a service. It is disappointing.”

The Royal Mail replies that it tried to move collection times from some post boxes to later in the day in order to improve services.

The excitement of receiving letters was never put more succinctly than by WH Auden in his poem, Night Mail: “Soon they shall long for letters and none will hear the postman’s knock without a quickening of the heart, for who can bear to think himself forgot?”

Well, I think we are – by the Royal Mail.

Damaging the environment they want to save

JET-SETTING multi-millionaire folk out to save the planet have been thrown into a dilemma.

The UN Conference on Climate Change is being held in Bali, where the airport is too small for all the private jets due to arrive. They’ll have to drop off their mega rich-but-caring passengers and then fly off to other Indonesian islands to await return, thereby doubling the amount of fuel used.

Why not hold the conference somewhere these poseurs can reach by train?