ukiprule

A review commissioned by the government on the UK postal service sector shows that EU policy is real reason for the decline in Royal Mail and lies behind the closure of thousands of post offices................

UK Independence Party - EU is to blame for Royal Mail decline

Martin Harvey

This is correct and there is a more comprehensive account of the events that caused this.
However UKIP must blame the three establishment Parties for allowing this situation to arise. The EU is only doing the dirty work while Cons and Labour shed crocodile tears. UKIP must convince the general public in all these EU matters that the Cons and Labour are responsible, so that UKIP ends up with their votes, at all National elections.
Martin Harvey.

Paul Nuttall

Post Office closures – The EU is to blame
Paul Nuttall
Post offices are being franchised at short notice and post offices in both rural and urban areas are closing all over the UK, why?
Voters expect MPs to support Post Offices but they are helpless because closure is being driven by the European Union with politicians whose parties enthusiastically support the EU preferring to confuse the issue by attacking the government and Royal Mail. They do this because Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MEPs all voted for the for the EU directives which are causing the closure of our post offices.
There is a Minister responsible for the postal services but the Minister has to instigate changes to the Post Office at every level because of EU directives. In part this explains why the Post Office was split up into Parcelforce, Counters, and Royal Mail Letters.
EU directive 97/67/EC stated that items weighing more than 100 grams, small parcels upwards, were opened up to competition on January 1 2003, with private companies, such as DHL, TNT, and the heavily-subsidized German Post Office, all moved in and coming in to compete on the most lucrative parts of the market.
Jan Bart-Henry of TNT Netherlands admitted recently that TNT are cherry-pickers, they do not want universal service obligation on new entrants to the UK post.
80 percent of post is business mail. The private companies bid for, and take, the lucrative part, the business mail. Your bank statement is prepared centrally; the private company takes all the mail away, delivering to the main postcode areas. The mail is dumped with the Post Office who then sort into local areas and deliver the statements. The Post Office picks up the expensive part of the business of mail delivery as well as collecting individual mailings from all the post boxes. Private companies are being subsidized by the work of the Post Office.
Leaving the Post Office with all the unprofitable work means that the Post Office has to get rid of the most expensive elements or go under. This is why hundreds of rural and urban post offices have closed or are under imminent threat leaving thousands of people, many of them elderly or infirm, with no local service.
On January 1, 2006, the Royal Mail lost its monopoly when EU directive 2002/39/EC opened up the delivery of all items of more than 50 grams, roughly the weight of the average letter, to competition
The Post Office has to deliver to every household in the land while private companies pick and choose what to deliver then it is obvious that the competition is skewed towards the private companies. The Post Office will struggle to be a national, universal service.
Why does the Royal Mail not make a bid for corresponding services in Holland and Germany? The answer is simple Dutch and German law forbids it.
Small post offices have been kept alive by the £150m Social Network Payment. There are two problems however: firstly the Post Office needs to be subsidized to the tune of £4 million per week, which leaves a shortfall of £58 million per year: secondly this subsidy can only continue till 2011 and then it will fall foul of EU legislation.
Meanwhile the government has made money making services including TV licenses and vehicle licences awkward to access for Post Office customers as the Post Office renewal option is are not well advertised on renewal notices, pension payments can be accessed through the Post Office but again access is made awkward for Post Office customers unless they bank with one of the post office partner banks. Another loss to Post Offices is the drive by utility companies such as BT to get their bills paid by direct debit bypassing the Post Office option. When there is the most need for the Social Network Payment subsidy, it is no longer enough and with inflation is worth less each year.
The obvious answer would be to increase the Social Network Payment but article 88 of the Treaty of Nice gives the EU the power to decide what state aid is allowed. While the government has EU permission to continue the subsidy for the time being it can not increase it.
There have also been proposals in Brussels that VAT will be charged on post, a 17.5% increase in price for no improvement in service!
In 2006, the EU Commission proposed a third Postal Service Directive which would fully liberalize Europe’s postal services by 2009. It was supported by countries which had already opened up their postal services to competition such as the UK, Sweden and Finland. However, the proposal was met with hostility by many other European countries who maintained their state monopolies. In July 2007 the European Parliament brokered a deal and the Europe’s postal services will be fully liberalized by 2011.