Westminster Forum on “The future of the Royal Mail, Post off

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Westminster Forum on “The future of the Royal Mail, Post office and the universal postal service,”

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Last Wednesday (2 February 2011) CAPOC was invited to speak at a half day Westminster Forum on “The future of the Royal Mail, Post office and the universal postal service,” in London.

Jim Latham was our speaker and the script agreed between us – it’s reproduced elsewhere on this site – your comments welcomed.

As the morning drew to a close, we tried to give our response to the morning’s proceedings, as the only representatives of the British public present amongst – with a few honourable exceptions – the generally self-centred, mercenary, bunch who made up the delegates to the forum.

Unfortunately, the chair, Nia Griffith MP, didn’t call us at the end of the final session – so here goes anyway:

If any real members of the public had been present, they would have been as horrified as we were at the level of discussion about the future of Royal Mail, Post Office and the universal postal service. If this was representative of what goes on behind the scenes of decision-making about a major British public service, God help us all.

It wasn’t a forum, it was a business-2-business conference where shares in future profits were being divvied up, company CVs were put on display, tenders were being placed with widely varying levels of subtlety, some staggering figures were revealed and those delegates apparently mandated to guard public interest did little to inspire confidence.

And mostly discussed in some kind of code – semantic arts and acronyms clearly figure highly in modern business skills and training.

The CAPOC award for achievement in her sector goes to Susan Barton from EALA Postal Services (part of Accenture – look it up) for her delicacy of approach. Apparently the future of Royal Mail, Post Office and the universal postal service should not concern itself with such distractions as the loss of post office branches and the major social impact this might have. This was simply “bringing emotionalism into the issue.” Unbelievable! The frightening thing was the number of violently nodding heads amongst the audience. We felt as though we should apologise for our presence, simply bow our heads and go on paying our taxes, so that this whole process could proceed without any more tiresome interruptions – they only need £1.34 billion of our money to modernise Post Office Ltd. (£1.34 billion – read it and weep).

We should also say that there was one (private) rebel view at least that a proportion of that £1.34 billion would go on compensating sub-posties, as even more branches close.

Enough abuse. We have to say that there was a certain fascination in observing another culture at work, but we also got a lot more from the session.

Not least, we were approached by Paula Vennells, the MD for POL who says she wants to work with us, we had a very useful chat with Dave Ward, Deputy General Secretary of the CWU and made a potentially very interesting contact with Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

There was more: PostComm’s activities cost Royal Mail £35 million, fascinating detail about the new PO “Essential” and “Local” branches which appear to be flavour of the month (watch this space).

And what about the future? Well, take this as notice that we intend to press for a public consultation on decisions that are about to be taken in our name. It’s simply inconceivable that these figures can be committed and the future of a service so central to the lives of all UK citizens can be adopted without one.