Post al efficiency
Sir: While both postal and telephone services steadily deteriorate, the cost to users of these vital facilities continues to escalate at ever-shorter intervals. Losses mount, and the only answer of the Post Office management is "we must charge more." If there is any plan to cut waste, promote real efficiency, and re-study the actual needs and priorities of today, it is certainly kept dark. Reportedly Sir Bill Ryland, that lugubrious apologist, would like to stay beyond his time, and no top outsider can be found to replace him. But I fear that more than his departure will be required. When, years ago, I worked for a time among centrally placed and powerful civil servants, I found it openly declared that the Post Office (then a government department) was the great repository for the untalented; the last choice of civil service examinees and entered only by those who scraped through; the convenient receptacle for a cross-posting of people who were found unable to advance in other departments. Perhaps this was a cruel fable.
If true, however, it explains much; for the upper levels of the present corporation would now be occupied largely by those who (through no fault of their own) would be quite simply incapable of running a huge, complex national business under modern conditions. In that event, there cannot be any hope of improvement without a humane clearance operation, along with—somehow — a sweeping introduction of fresh, capable and imaginative people. Could Patrick Cosgrave's Lord Stansgate for once be right? Arthur Coleridge 33 Peel Street, London, WS
Previous page
