Royal Mail's privatisation will only end one way
2nd November 2009
The saga of utility privatisation so far has not exactly been a glorious one.
The water companies have failed to stem the haemorrhaging leaks that will one day cost us all dear. They have preferred greedy bonuses to infrastructural repair and investment. And their collection techniques remain in the dark ages. Considering an inordinate amount of rain topples onto this country year in year out, their performance is nothing short of disgraceful.
The opening of electricity and gas supplies to 'competition' (the inverted commas are there to record its artificiality) has resulted in very little beyond higher and higher prices. The industry - like the Government - failed miserably to grasp that the only medium-term option was nuclear. It has invested little or nothing in the long-term option of harnessing the sun's enormous output of energy. And now (thirty years after Scargill) it wants us all to fall back upon coal-fired generation. Pathetic.
The rail companies wrestle with a 'market' (the inverted commas are there to record Sir Humphreyist complexity) that has been slashed by recession and bashed by the omnipresent car. Investment has been slow, late and piecemeal. A poor safety record has been marked by several disasters - one of which nearly killed me ten years ago. And here too, prices have gone through the roof: but service reliability has been deliberately obfuscated by cynically reduced arrival promises in timetables. A full seven years after the French tunnel link to Paris was achieving regular (and safe) speeds in excess of 200 mph, UK trains were still chugging through the Kent countryside at a third of that velocity. And as for the prices....well, they're ridiculous.
Now the Royal Mail is about to go the same way.
One would've thought there might have been some learning along the way, but I see no sign of it: the old, inept processes will be repeated - because the Civil Service knows no other way, and New Labour has lost its way. Ironically, the certainty of this outlook was confirmed when, late last week, Cameron's Conservatives reaffirmed their intention to sell the whole thing off. For as we are all quickly realising, the coming Tory Government will represent a change of emphasis rather than an intelligent rethink.
So here's my prediction - and I don't need to become Gypsy Rose Lee in order to make it.
Sir Humphrey will find a new way to segment the functions of the former highly inefficient Royal Mail. From his perspective, such will be a vital analysis, for it guarantees a promise of work for those Civil Servants who would otherwise be shown the door - and increases the likelihood of some fat lunches with the myriad management consultancies who will be asked to aid in the process.
This will probably entail one company owning the sorting offices, another the post offices, and a third the delivery vehicles. Royal Mail will be left in sole control of the letter boxes and the Shetland Isles.
The country will be split into six regions, and each will compete with the others to offer services ranging from topical conversation through to delivery of a letter within a week and more than one collection a fortnight. The whole will be watched over by an enormous Quango (Ofpost) which will warn all the companies on a weekly basis to stop overcharging and underpromising. There will be dire threats, and an annual fine smaller than the marketing director's bonus.
Within two years it will cost £3 to send a letter second class, and all the companies will insist that they cannot make money until a three-tier system is introduced. This will be granted after much fuss, and consist of first class, second class and third rate. Third rate will be positioned as a service tailored to the needs of those who get less than forty letters a week, don't want junk mail, have big dogs and live in remote places that aren't the Shetland Isles.
After four years, the Daily Mail will ask why a company with a monopoly of letter-boxes is still making huge losses. A nationwide clamour for Something To Be Done will follow, and Royal Mail (Letterboxes 2011) plc will be sold to Newscorp. The Murdoch family will immediately convert the letterboxes into wifi centres where all letters can be converted into email provided every customer buys a copy of The Sun.
By the close of year six, the regional companies will be owned by AOL, France Telecom, Google, Deutsche Post, Twitter and the China People's Daily. All the letters will carry advertising sold by Newsbox, a Newscorp company. On May 24th of that year, Al Q'eida will send two letter bombs to President Mandelson, following which all letters sent by anyone to anywhere will opened in advance by GCHQ, thus providing employment for a further 723,000 civil servants,
YouGov will conduct a survey among 25-50 year old urban families, 83% of whom will say they find the services perfectly satisfactory, but they haven't sent a letter in years. Those aged over seventy won't be asked: being no longer allowed to drive, polling companies will assume their brains have turned to porridge,
While the details may be awry here and there, the general progress is I'm sure right on the money. Home delivery will be phased out in favour of franchised pick-up points. All but the main Post Offices will be closed, charges scaled depending on the difficulty of delivery, and discounts on price available in return for agreeing to take junk mail. One day in the not too distant future, writing letters will be the preserve of the very old (who can only afford to send three a year, and have no computer literacy) and a trendy new retro target audience identified by marketing.
Some of this really is progress, I admit: email plays a bigger part in my life today (even beyond nby) than the mail ever did. But the lack of expectation among the Establishment after a quarter-century of privatisations remains as good a measure as any of just how unwilling they are to learn.
There's more to delivering mail than a process being overtaken by electronic communication. Sub-Post Offices are more than places where you can post stuff. There's such a thing as the social weal - and this doesn't have to mean inefficient State ownership. Mixed economies should be about mixed motives, not ownership: and the measure of water provision, public transport and power supplies should not be the ROI for the shareholders.
When it comes to important social stuff, fuck the shareholders - they have more than enough other businesses to screw up.
Update 2.11.09:
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