THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
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• On the surface, the latest round of disruption in the postal service offers an unprecedented opportunity for the country's parcels carriers to make a killing. The customer is fed up with the level of service given by the Post Office — a service generally acknowledged to be not only bad but deteriorating. The Government is fed up with the inability of the Post Office to effect the sort of sweeping change in attitude and service which is required to cure the problems. The parcels companies are fed up with not being allowed to compete head-on with the existing postal services.
What could be better, then, than to allow the parcels carriers to take over work from a strike-bound Post Office, to prove in the short term that they do, indeed, offer a viable, competitive alternative? The answer is, alas, that just about any other solution would be preferable.
Although the Post Office is not a star in any aspect of its business (apart perhaps, from the ability to invent new "premium" services which offer, at a price, standards of service which the public should be able to expect at no extra cost), it is already quite good at the sort of thing which the parcels companies do.
Collecting items from a large number of known points (be they post boxes or business addresses) and channelling those items through one or more hubs to a similar number of known delivery points (be they post offices or business addresses) is a difficult but not impossible task. They Post Office's own definition of "delivery" rests on that part of the operation, finishing with getting the item to the last post office in the chain, not to the end consumer, because that is the bit which can be done in an organised, mechanised, fashion.
What the Post Office has not cracked — and what the parcels companies have not even begun to address yet — is the problem of the simultaneous delivery of tens of millions of items a day to millions of individual addresses. Except in the cases of outlying areas or of big individual customers receiving huge consignments, postal deliveries do not lend themselves to the van-based culture of the parcels companies.
Just as the Mercury private telephone network has failed to provide a viable alternative to the public network except in the case of large business subscribers, the parcels companies are set up in such a way that they can only provide a viable alternative service to a limited section of the population. Even then, the combined forces of deadly business rivals would be required to match even the ruthless inefficiency of the existing system.
The parcels companies do have a very important role to play in the distribution of small items around the country and, perhaps, even overseas. A system whereby the parcels companies and the Post Office tendered on equal terms for the provision of nationwide parcels delivery services would be a step forward. Perhaps there could even be two rival networks, one state-owned and one regionally private, as in the television industry with the BBC and ITV.
The letters service, however, is a different ballgame on a different pitch. No private company or consortium can ever hope to replicate a service which has grown up as a public service, not a profit-making venture, and still hope to make a decent return to its shareholders.
It is not through a lack of merit that the parcels companies should be discouraged from raising the hopes of the consumer that the postal service can be transformed. It is simply unrealistic to expect them to be able to create a system even as flawed as the existing one — much less as good as the public has a right to expect.