12/21/2023 0 Comments Whistl postieThe “universal service obligation” – according to which the Royal Mail must deliver six days a week at a set price anywhere in the land – is both a sacred legal duty and a hefty financial burden. A pact with the unions to end industrial strife is finite and potentially fragile. But the next few years will test the Royal Mail and its leader. Moya Greene received much of the credit for the turnround that led to the listing of 70 per cent of its shares. Successful privatisation showed that investors saw value in this volatile mix. The contrast between Chorley and Marple underlines how the Royal Mail combines industrial production line, social mission, commercial enterprise and national treasure in one institution. Moya Greene, Royal Mail chief executive © Dan Burn-Forti With these resources, the Marple office must deliver mail to an area that stretches from suburban terraced streets, via pretty wooded valleys – known locally as “Little Switzerland” – to hilltop moorland on the edge of the Peak District. On the day I visited in early August, four were off sick, including one bitten by a dog the previous day, and there were three unfilled vacancies. He is juggling a platoon of 35 postmen and women, or “posties”. Delivery office managers – or “Doms” – such as Bodnar act like Royal Mail’s commanders in the trenches. Inside the bunker-like building, manager Nic Bodnar works the phones in a room squeezed between the small sorting floor and the men’s changing room. Together, they handle letters and an increasing number of parcels – about 10 times as many as Parcelforce. Marple’s delivery office is one of 1,400 nationwide. The person who has to reconcile these two extremes is Canadian chief executive Moya Greene, 60, the first woman and the first foreigner to hold the office – and the first manager of any sort to run the postal service as a quoted company, following its privatisation a year ago. If Chorley is a well-oiled postal machine, then the Royal Mail’s outpost in Marple, on the opposite side of Manchester, still looks like the hand-cranked version of the system. Most important, managers and staff at Parcelforce – which has long operated as an autonomous express parcel unit within Royal Mail, up against FedEx, UPS and others – are highly sensitive to competition. Between 8pm and 4am, five nights a week, at a rate of up to 14,000 items an hour, lorries feed in packages on one side, which are processed automatically and packed into outbound vehicles on the other, for onward despatch along the “spokes” for which Chorley is a hub.Ĭhorley stands at one extreme of the modernisation of the Royal Mail, Britain’s five-century-old postal service. No item is supposed to spend more than three minutes inside the vibrating multicoloured metal framework, filled with carousels, conveyor belts and slides. It is surprising anyone in the year-old warehouse had time to spot the animal. “But it was obvious what it was, because it looked like a horse wrapped up.” “It was stuffed,” says Peter Jones, manager of Parcelforce’s new processing centre in Chorley, northwest of Manchester.
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