Royal Mail fined £11.7M for lost post
 

Found this one article on why the UK post is so bad.

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story...ticle_continue

Royal Mail fined £11.7m for losing millions of letters and parcels

Martin Wainwright
Saturday February 11, 2006
The Guardian

The Royal Mail has been fined £11.7m for allowing millions of letters and parcels to be lost or stolen because of poor supervision of agency staff. The penalty comes close to costing it £1 for every one of 14.6m items that never reached their destination over a 10-month period. It will cut the company's operating profit by 2% this year.
The fine came with an unusually sharp condemnation of lax standards from the industry's regulator, Postcomm, which blamed a hands-off approach for incidents such as the employment of a man who had been jailed for robbing a post office. The chairman of Postcomm, Nigel Stapleton, said the fault lay overwhelmingly with management during the period of "serious shortcomings" from August 2004 to May 2005.

He said it should not be seen as a comment on "the dedication and commitment of postmen and postwomen". The failings arose because a large and highly decentralised organisation had lacked the controls "to ensure that procedures for protecting mail are being followed across the company".
The Royal Mail said it would appeal against the fine within 28 days and promised to "do all in its power to reverse the unreasonable size of the fine". A spokesman said it was unfair, had no basis in logic and disregarded millions of pounds of compensation paid to customers.

"The fine simply diverts money that could otherwise have been invested in customer service to Treasury coffers, with no benefit whatsoever for customers," he said. "Postcomm's report concentrates on events that occurred up to two years ago, when Royal Mail was going through massive operational change. We are now providing the best quality of service in its history, and the vast bulk of mail arrives safely and on time."

The fine was welcomed by consumers' group Postwatch, though its chairwoman, Millie Banerjee, said it was too small. She said: "To send a clear message to Royal Mail, the UK's universal service provider, we believe that Postcomm should have proposed a financial penalty equivalent to 5% of last year's operating profit - which would mean a fine of £26.85m."

She said customers would welcome the penalty because the service was far from satisfactory.

Good.

Thank god, see I am not crazy. They should be paying us for lost postage!

Thats a shame though since the postal service is nationalized it reflects horribly on the government, I mean if it was private industry like say a British FEDEX or UPS then it would be more acceptable to think but this is government, makes you wonder what else is corrupted.

YES!!!I should get a check from them for like $100 or so from the past year that I spent on packages that never made it there.Nice to see they will have to tighten up now.

That's Great!! :D