Consigned to a shambles

The railway, invented in the North of England and exported to the world, is a shambles. The National Health Service, once the envy of other nations, is in a shameful state. And now the Post Office, considered the best of its kind a decade ago, is facing "death by a thousand cuts".

Of all these sorry stories, the decline of the Post Office has been the most spectacular. From a profit of £500 million in 1999, it is now losing £1 million a day.

What has gone wrong? A familiar story: bad management and political timidity.

The management failure can be summed up in one word: Consignia. When bosses were granted limited commercial freedom, their priority was to spend a fortune replacing two of the country's favourite brands, the Post Office and Royal Mail, with a meaningless word of consultant-speak.

Managers demonstrated similar recklessness towards their greatest asset, the workforce. Not so long ago, the Post Office chief executive was rightly lauding postal workers as his "ambassadors to the public". More recently, an independent inquiry labelled Consignia's industrial relations as "a disaster".

A lack of political courage by both this Government and the last is another major factor.

During the Conservative years the electronic revolution took off. But while the Post Office's European competitors adapted quickly to the new competition, the Tories failed to give Britain's postal service the freedom to do likewise. Neither did they invest enough in new technology; the Treasury instead helped itself to £1.5 billion in Post Office profits.

New Labour has also dithered. It chose not to protect the Post Office as a vital public service, or to privatise it properly. Its "third way" has proved to be a disastrous compromise.

Now our morning post is at risk, the rural mail service is under threat and, thousands of postal "ambassadors" look set to be sacked.

Consignia bosses and ministers have delivered another public service disaster.

Updated: 10:20 Thursday, January 31, 2002