NOT SORTED

Why is our mail late? Because the post office is a workers' paradise,

says Ross Clark IN the brave new Britain of wall-to-wall gizmos it is reassuring to know that there Is one place left in London that is still buzzing with Dickensian technology. It is called Mount Pleasant sorting office and is a world of pigeon-holes, hand trolleys and sorry figures hunched over benches. No wonder the elderly British Legion party that is winding up its afternoon excursion is in such jovial mood; warm beer and bicycling maids might be a bit thin on the ground these days, but at least the Royal Mail is still the good old rattling public service it was when they first clung to their seats watching Night Mail at their local Odeon.

Not everybody is so impressed with the mail service, however. I've come here to try to find out why so many Spectator readers have been complaining about the magazine arriving late through the post; why a fuming Thomas Griffin writes from Lowndes Place telling us his Spectator takes five days to reach the depths of SW1; why E. Trevor Jones of Mold writes to tell us his magazine never reaches him on Fridays any more; and why David Neil-Gallacher scribbles It'll take a few more years yet, before you're properly accepted.' menacingly from Brooks's that our sub- scription service has become 'slovenly'.

`We deliver all our copies on Thursday morning to Chelmsford sorting office,' says Don Brown from subscriptions. 'They are already sorted, so we've done a lot of the Post Office's work for it. From Chelmsford they go to Hatfield and from there the London copies go to Mount Pleasant. But for several years we've had a problem with London copies in particular, so in future we are going to start trucking them straight to Mount Pleasant.'

It would be nice to cut out Mount Pleas- ant as well, but unfortunately the Royal Mail is Britain's last nationalised monopoly. Were you, I, Richard Branson, or, more hopefully, the United Parcel Ser- vice or the Dutch PTT, to challenge the Royal Mail by daring to set up a rival ser- vice, the full weight of the law would descend. It is illegal in this country for any- one other than the Royal Mail to deliver a letter or a packet unless the customer is charged at least £1 an item. So, sorry, Messrs Griffin, Jones and Neil-Gallacher, there isn't a whole lot we can do this side of persuading the government to do what even Margaret Thatcher refused to do in the bizarre belief, so it appeared, that it would be an insult to the Queen — and that is to privatise the Royal Mail.

I am introduced to Mount Pleasant's manager, Vince Calouri, and we begin the tour that many a Blue Peter presenter has trodden before — in fact, Blue Peter's milk- bottle-top depot was on site until the sad day in 1972 when Watch with Mother was interrupted with a newsflash to the effect that several tons' worth of them had gone up in smoke. My first impression is of an NHS for buff envelopes: thousands of let- ters are hanging around on trolleys waiting for operations to commence. Buzzing around them are dozens of staff in blue uniforms, or at least the liberal interpreta- tions of them you'd expect of the Lower Fourth at Upton Snodsbury Comp. Scrawled on the walls around them are the vestiges of unionised Britain: 'Arthur Fowler is innocent. OK!' reads one myste- rious message. What strikes one instantly is the lack of co-ordinated technology. Poke your nose into any other commercial operation these days and the only people you see are perched in front of computers. Yet, on the lower of Mount Pleasant's two floors, you look in vain for anything resembling a computer: a quarter of all mail is still sort- ed entirely by hand. 'It's what I call the market town down here, there's so many people around,' says Mr Calouri. 'Try to walk between the white lines, else you might get a packet thrown at you.' And he isn't joking. Wham! A parcel for Mrs Jones of Nuneaton is flung about six feet across the room into a wire bin. One won- ders what they make of the word 'Fragile' — a town in Burgundy, perhaps?

Upstairs, there is a whizzy new post-sort- ing machine installed five years ago, but the automated elements are bizarrely dis- jointed. The main object of the layout seems to be to ensure there are still plenty of jobs for people wheeling trolleys from one machine to another. Letters rejected by the automatic sorting machine are spewed out via an impressive-looking revolving drum. Then they fall on to a short length of conveyor-belt, from where . . they fall on to the floor.

One can't say that the post never works: two letters posted to me from central Lon- don at 5 p.m. as an experiment somehow manage to weasel their way through Mount Pleasant to the washroom of my Cambridgeshire home by 9 a.m. the next morning (my postman doesn't yet seem to have spotted the letterbox, several yards further on). Yet does Mount Pleasant real- ly still need 4,000 employees when virtually every other business has managed to pare down its manual staff so dramatically over the past couple of decades?

`You could automate it all, I suppose,' says Mr Calouri. 'But no one's yet invent- ed a machine to cope with parcels. You could perhaps introduce more automation if you were starting on a greenfield site, `My wife's sick, so I had to bring the kids to work: but here in central London I don't think there would be room.'

Since Mount Pleasant, with its associat- ed ramps for jerky, whining red vans, occu- pies almost an entire precinct between Gray's Inn Road and Farringdon Road, this sounds a little far-fetched: wouldn't it save a lot of room if you did away with the trolleys, rest rooms and Coca-Cola machines? A more likely explanation for the lack of machinery is that such a move would upset the Communication Workers' Union. When the Post Office National Users' Council — a statutory body set up in 1969 — dared to question overmanning, it received the full lash of the union's tongue.

`There are a lot of postmen starting work at six and finishing their rounds at nine, which doesn't quite match up with the standard eight hours' working day,' says the council's spokesman, James Dodd. `Although they will then help with some of the pre-sorting for the next day and mak- ing second deliveries, the Post Office should be asking, do we really need all these men hanging round for all these hours? Only around 4 per cent of post goes out on second rounds. If the Post Office could get more of the mail to the delivery offices in time for it to go out on the first round, they could save a lot of money. But the unions complained, saying it would do away with 25,000 jobs.'

You can see the true nature of nation- alised industry in such a response: you can't have efficiency if it will destroy jobs. Yet that, surely, is the whole point of it. There are plenty of better-paid jobs in the IT sector — currently experiencing skills' shortages — awaiting any postman pre- pared to make the break and do a few months at night school.

Similar attitudes, one suspects, preserve first- and second-class post. I tried an experiment to determine whether there really is any difference in paying that extra seven pence. I sent a pair of letters to myself from Kent, a pair from London and a pair from the postbox 200 yards down the road from my home. The local letters, and those from London, arrived simultane- ously; only the letters from Kent arrived at different times, the first-class the next morning, the second-class three mornings later, which made one wonder whether the postman had deliberately put it under his hat to make a point. Why slow down the whole process to weed out the 30 per cent of letters with a second-class stamp? Prob- ably because to merge first- and second- class post would do away with the dozen or so employees who are fumbling around at the `second-class desk', sorting incoming letters into two piles.

The lack of technology is seriously wor- rying the Post Office National Users' Council. 'Mount Pleasant hasn't really changed since I was doing shifts as a stu- dent,' says Mr Dodd. 'Overall we think the postal service is reasonable, but it hasn't improved over the past six years, especially in London. The Royal Mail was once the best in Europe, but other postal services have overtaken us because they have invested more.'

Until now the Royal Mail has been under no outside regulation, and has even failed to reach its own, pretty lax targets.

In 1994 it declared that the following year it was going to deliver 92.5 per cent of first-class letters by the following working day. It didn't succeed then, and hasn't met that target in any year since. Last year it did meet its target for delivering parcels, but since it was aiming to deliver only 88 per cent of them within three working days it is hardly time to pop the champagne.

But the net is finally closing in. Last Monday, the new Post Services Commis- sion was given regulatory powers. It will control the prices of mail, and have powers to fine the Post Office for failing to meet new, tougher targets and to deal with Granny's squashed chocolates. 'It strikes us as wrong that the Post Office refuses to pay any compensation,' says spokesman Andy Frewin. 'There is a lot of money at stake if mail shots are delayed.'

Better still, there is a chance — a discus- sion document is doing the rounds — that the Post Office monopoly will be eased and private firms will at last be allowed to apply for a licence to offer a cheaper and more reliable service. London, you can be assured, will be first to benefit.

Why is it in the capital, where Victorian heroines and their beaux used to be able to exchange sweet nothings through the post half-a-dozen times a day, that things are at their worst? 'We've now got people downstairs dealing with it,' says Vince Calouri. 'It isn't always easy to distinguish between WI and the West Indies.'

So, if there's a Rasta reading this in downtown Kingston, Jamaica, good day to you. But our rag was really meant to go a mile down the road to Brooks's.

`Ainun — sun-dried.'