Royal Mail and their fine

[BensGrandad]

It has just been reported on the 6 oclock news that due to their poor performance Royal Mail are expected to be fined £80m.

Two questions which I hope somebody can answer for me.

1. Who gets the £80m presumably it goes into the countries 'kitty' If so why should Gordon Brown have another £80m to squander as he has done most of our tax money?
2. Will this fine make my local postie put my letters in the correct door as this is apparently the biggest factor as to why the fine was imposed? In general how will the fine improve the service?

 

[NSC Albion]

I read somewhere that they had lost a LOT of letters.

But included in this statistic were a large number of letters addressed incorrectly.

One I just saw on the news was addressed to "The boy with lots of pets, Berkshire[or some other county-can't remember.]"

 

[Biscuit]

I cant understand why people moan about play 25p to send a letter anywhere in the UK. Royal mail do a fantastic job. Posties are underappreciated, sure they make mistakes but who dont? Personally, I think the fine is unfair, far to much.

 

[berkshire seagull]

Load of bollocks it is and royal mail are getting there slowly and chopping many jobs.
Yeah very strange where that money will go mmmmm

 

[fatboy]

They need to sort it out as they cannot privatise the industry.

Personally I prefer carrier pigeons to royal males.

 

[Biscuit]

2. Will this fine make my local postie put my letters in the correct door as this is apparently the biggest factor as to why the fine was imposed? In general how will the fine improve the service?

Consider a postman has to collect several hundred letters and sort them in a very short amount of time, maybe the occasional letter gets stuck in between the two, or maybe he reads an address incorrectly while sorting at speed.

A fine wont help, it'll simply increase the pressure.

 

[adrian29uk]

Its those fat greedy bastards who sit in the warm all day and cream of the money that need to be bought to book. Instead actually taking 80 million from the company, why dont they take it out of the fat cats personal estates and savings, that way it might teach them a lesson to provide a decent service. What gets my goat is when the Royal Mail say they cannot guarantee delivery even when you pay for recorded delivery. Whats the point of post at all if we are being told things like this. The postal service is rubbish. I feel sorry for the poor posties working in the freezing cold rain, its the people at the top that need to fined and also need to get out on there bloody bikes and get drenched.

 

[berkshire seagull]

Yeah it was 400 odd letters to put away in an hour and half,but now 6-700 and 4hr rounds.

 

[Biscuit]

The postal service is rubbish.

So you think 25p to send a letter anywhere in the uk rubbish? Well why not make sure the letter gets their by driving to the destination. That might make you realise the money it costs!

What gets my goat is when the Royal Mail say they cannot guarantee delivery even when you pay for recorded delivery

Of course they can't! If you send a letter to 'Mr Bloggs, under the blue car, somewhere in hereford' they cannot garantee they will find him! If they made a gaurantee you could make obscure address' and then sue them for not living up to what they say they could do!

 

[Beach Hut]

Presumably we will collectively pay this fine of £80m as Tax Payers ?

Another labour stealth tax

 

[Seagull Stew]

Yeah it was 400 odd letters to put away in an hour and half,but now 6-700 and 4hr rounds.

And there you have the answer as to why the fine.
It's all about profit margins for Royal Mail at the end of the day.
If cutting back in having the sufficient workforce to do the job properly results in a serious drop in performance then companies like Royal Mail, who are in a pretty priviledged almost a monopoly position, should be given "incentives" to increase the staff numbers again. This also helps employment figures.
Well done to the Government for actually having the guts to tackle these Privatised companies head on. Next stop maybe electricity, with heavy fines for those that put such a workload on their meter readers that more mistakes are made and old age pensioners are sent demands for payments of hundreds of pounds more than what they owe!

 

[The Clown of Pevensey Bay]

Presumably we will collectively pay this fine of £80m as Tax Payers ?

Another labour stealth tax

No we won't. Royal Mail is a private company (owned by the government, but private). It has to make its own money from the things it sells in its post offices and shops, and from Parcel Force, and stuff.

I was briefly an agency postie, and was given a large area of Patcham to deliver post to. I had no training at all, and was pretty poorly paid. It's also a nightmare to sort 2000 or so letters in 2 hours. I made mistakes, and I don't blame others for doing so.

Interestingly, each individual item of mail is handled by about 150 people between you posting it and it arriving.

It still annoys me when my post doesn't arrive on time, but I blame management.

 

[BensGrandad]

I think that we are all agreed that the fine will not make any difference to the service whether in your opinion it is good value or not.

Perhaps if the postage goes up by 1p for 2nd class and 2p for 1st that will pay the fine so there is again only one loser as usual.

 

[Stumpy Tim]

Get rid of Second Post to start with. What a waste of time that is. Over here they have one post at midday. And no one says, "I wish we had another post three hours later".

The Royal Mail haven't come to terms with E-mail, the Internet & mobile phones. The post isn't as important as it was, so there's no need to deliver letters twice a day

 

[Marshy]

70% of the mail they deliver is junk, if they didnt have to do that........

Its all that shite that clogs up the mail service and that is where the problem lies in my opinion.

 

[Spiros]

Marshy - the junk mail is what PAYS for the postal system. If that was creamed off by private companies or didn't exist, we'd have to pay a lot more to post a letter.

Next time you get junk mail, look inside for a postage-paid envelope. If you don't want the product/credit card/whatever, just seal the empty envelope and put it in the next post box you pass. At no cost to you this helps to keep postal costs down for all of us (and annoy the companies that send it all out in the first place). I probably post 10-15 of these a week.

 

[CHAPPERS]

Is the royal mail as QUANGO?

 

[fatbadger]

This is just Gordon Brown f***ing with the Mail so that he can privatise the industry. Twat.

 

[ben andrews' girlfriend]

why does everyone think that everything thing that the government does is "another way to rip us off"

f*** sake, we arent exactly poor or a country thats falling on its face are we??

 

[Biscuit]

why does everyone think that everything thing that the government does is "another way to rip us off"

f*** sake, we arent exactly poor or a country thats falling on its face are we??

Laura for president!