The Post Office scandal
John Grigg
In the consciousness of most British people there is only one Carter of any significance at the moment — the American president of that name who stole the show last weekend and whose alternating expressions of beatific sweetness and rather terrifying seriousness have been mesmerising us all. But there is another Carter whose name will soon be in the news and who might be described as the Annan of the Post Office. He is Charles Carter, vice-chancellor of Lancaster university and chairman of the committee which has been investigating the affairs of the Post Office since the beginning of last year.
The Carter Report is now ready and has been delivered to the Industry secretary, Mr Varley. Its official date of publication has not yet been fixed but will probably be within six to eight weeks. Meanwhile the Observer has followed its success in leaking a version of 'Annan' with a confident preview of the main comments and recommendations of 'Carter'. On 1 May the enterprising Adam Raphael revealed that it would include 'the most trenchant public criticism ever to have been made of a nationalised body', and that it would recommend, among other things, splitting the Post Office into two separate corporations for posts and telecommunications.
The existing body was set up in 1969, when the old public service organisation, subject to direct ministerial control, was replaced by a Morrisonian body similar to other nationalised industries. Since then costs to the consumer have rocketed while standards of service, at any rate on the postal side, have plummeted. In 1971 the first-class letter rate was 3p and the second-class 24. There were increases in 1973 and 1974, and in 1975 two increases within the year bringing the rates to the present 84p and 6ip. At this point public anger became so manifest that the Carter committee was appointed.
It was not just that people objected to paying the higher prices, but that they felt they were not getting value for money. Everyone can testify that first-class letters are not to be relied on to reach their destinations more quickly than second-class, whereas it should be a rare occurrence for them to take more than twenty-four hours to be delivered to any but the most remote addresses in the United Kingdom.
Matters were made far worse a year ago, when the Post Office suspended Sunday collections. This change was strongly opposed by the Post Office Users' National Council (a statutory body established under the 1969 Act), but the Post Office went ahead with it despite POUNC's objections and despite the fact that the Carter committee was already at Work. The latest blow is a further increase in charges, to 9p and 7p, likely to take effect from early next month.
Telecommunications charges have also increased dramatically — by over 100 per cent compared with 1970 — but in that department there has been no comparable drop in efficiency..News that the Post Office would be recording a huge profit on telecommunications led to the recent decision, under pressure from the Government, that each user should be given a rebate of £7.
When trying to assess the performance of Sir William Ryland and the Post Office board, it is necessary to acknowledge, in all fairness, that they have been subject to competing, indeed contradictory, pressures. On the one hand they have been required, in common with other nationalised industries, to charge increasingly economic prices and to aim at financing their own capital investment. On the other hand they have been open to bitter criticism from the public for abusing their monopoly and putting up the cost of living, and from time to time the Government has made them a scapegoat for its own policies.
Nevertheless, it is hair] to doubt that the Post Office has been incompetent in many ways, and not least in its public relations. Suspending Sunday collections, and the way it was done, showed extraordinary insensitivity, and there is all too much reason to believe that the Post Office is obsessed with telecommunications and inclined to regard letter -writing as antiquated and marginal. It is assumed to be self-evident that telecommunications should not subsidise the postal service, though why a profitable department should not subsidise a necessary, but unprofitable one within a single corporation is a mystery to many of us.
It is a typical modern heresy that the telephone is supplanting the letter as surely as the motor-bus has supplanted the horsebus. The telephone is, indeed, a marvellous amenity as well as a major social scourge. It both enriches and impoverishes life. But in any case there are many purposes for which the written word will always be preferable to the spoken word, and until there is a telex in every home (at present there are only 55,000 telex machines in the whole country) the need for an efficient and reasonably cheap letter post will be clamant.
Even in business, the only advantage of the telephone is speed. In other respects it often makes for confusion and misunderstanding, where a letter would have made for clarity. Using the telephone, people are apt to talk off the top of their heads, whereas in writing a letter they are more likely to reduce their thoughts to some kind of order.
So far, as private letter-writing is eon" cerned, the psychological importance of Sunday collections is not to be disregarded. The weekend is for many the best time to write letters to friends and relations, and a collection on Sunday afternoon conceit' trates the mind wonderfully. To restore this service would cost about £9 million, and do subsidy is needed it should not be grudged. But instead of thinking of ways to restore it the Post Office is contemplating further mischief in the form of eliminating
deliveries on weekdays. second
Surprisingly, the volume of letters is said to have fallen by only about four per cent since charges last went up, in SepteMbe,r 1975. But this is an unaudited figure anu may in any case not give a true picture of the traffic in letters, as distinct from circulars, printed papers and small packets. One of the Carter committee's complaints will' apparently, be that the Post Office lacks accurate information on how many letters and parcels pass through its sorting offices' 'because the Union of Post Office Workers has refused to cooperate'. Common observation suggests that the traffic in genuine letters has fallen by more than the Post Office admits.
Inflation and the requirement to aim for self-sufficiency account for much, if not all, of the price increases which have eause± and are causing, so much annoyance. In it postal rates the United Kingdom coMPares favourably with most other Western Ent0. pean countries, though slightly unfavourably with the United States. It is perhaps unfortunate that legislation to enlarge the Post Office board (for the purpose of accommodating 'worker' directors and, at the Liberals' insistence, rer, resentatives of users) has been introduce° in advance of the Carter Report. It Might have been better to wait until all the Pr°bj lems of the industry could be considereu and tackled together. But that is a detail'. Whatever happens, it is most importani that the postal service should once again be treated as of crucial value to the common" ity, and should not be left to languish as a poor relation of telecommunications. Unless it can be subsidised within the Pres" ent unified body, it should (as 'Carter' is ,expected to recommend) be separated frog!, telecommunications and subsidised, " necessary, by the State. Of course it should be made to work as economically as possible, and one condition of State support should be a substantial improvement in productivity. According tn_ Adam Raphael, 'Carter' will say that thes mechanical letter sorting programme ha. been, so far, 'a financial disaster', and tha; its completion has been delayed by betweed four and twelve years. A separate bog,. would have nothing to distract it from t ' !`_ task of modernising the service and resto_i_ ing its reputation, which used to be unmatched in the world.
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