UK Postal Competition

Our main postal service is Royal Mail, however, it's largely legacy infrastructure left over from when BT was separated from the PTO (Post Office Telecommunications). There is very little competition in provision of door2door postal service, something that has to change. There are a few bulk delivery agencies licensed, UKMail and TNT being the largest.

With postal workers on strike over pay and conditions I would like to see:

• Postal prices go up to closer to their commercial rivals (39p compared to £2 is unnecessarily cheap).
• Postal workers get pay rises, to be in-line with their commercial rivals.
• Modernisation within Royal Mail, for automatic sorting machines, bar-codes, and RFIDs on sacks etc.
• Royal Mail long-term temporary employed staff offered full-time contracts with pension provision.
• Government legislation obliging both Companies like Royal Mail and Unions like CWU to go through a meaningful arbitration process with ACAS before engaging in any strikes.
• Breaking up Royal Mail if it helps competition. Each Region should be a separate franchise (minimum of 10 different companies running the franchises to ensure competition in provision).
• Ban Royal Mail from delivery of un-addressed door2door junk mail. (Replacing the door2door "opt-out" system which doesn't work)

These changes for a start should stop the current strikes, increase productivity and pay for workers. Even stopping the disgruntled posties which dump red elastic bands on my door step and drive every day!

Better UK post codes

Current post codes take the form of 8 alphanumeric characters, but that only indicates a street (or one side of the street typically).

What we really need is a post code which includes the property reference.

So CB1 2QP which is Abbey Street in Cambridge gets an additional number at the end to indicate the property number, making it CB1 2QP 14.

Each post code may have up to 999 properties on it, and so the number can be anything from 1-999 (does not need to be zero padded). The 14 does not necessarily need to correlate with the building number, but if the street is numbered, those numbers should correlate. If the buildings have names they should be assigned a number.

So when we phone up to give our address and order something, we only need to provide CB1 2QP 14, and not need the person at the other end to select our house name from a big drop-down list.