It seems that our postal services are in for a drastic shake-up. Detailed above are two strands of this. Firstly, there is the reorganisation announced by Consignia to turn round the loss-making aspects of their activities. Secondly, there are the plans of POSTCOMM (the Postal Services Commission) to gradually expose Consignia to competition in its present monopoly market.
In the first part there has been no visible involvement by consumers of postal services. The Editor suspects that the new postal watchdog, the Consumer Council for Postal Services, known rather cleverly as POSTWATCH, has been involved, but there has been no attempt that he is aware of, to tell the users of postal services whether POSTWATCH agrees with what Consignia is doing, has raised objections, or has been ignored. There is no line of communication between ourselves and POSTWATCH.
In the second part, POSTCOMM has kept us and other interested parties informed as to their proposals for competition. We were among a number of bodies invited to attend the seminar about them and we shall be making our views known. It is just as well, however, that we took an interest because actual consumers of postal services (apart from POSTWATCH, about whose effectiveness I have still to be convinced) were a bit thin on the ground at the seminar.
There are two important points here. The first is that there are dozens of consultation papers to which we should be making responses. There are numerous seminars, discussion groups and other meetings which we should be attending. This is because we really are the only grass roots organisation and it is very important that we make our voice heard. We do remarkably well considering how limited are our resources, but we could be much more efficient if our long discussed communications linkup was actually started.
The second point is about recognition. One gets the feeling that the Consumer Council for Postal Services is not interested in telling us (or anybody?) how they are looking after our interests. To whom are they accountable? We are ignored in other quarters as being small and insignificant. Small, yes, insignificant, I don't think so. But we are not making our presence felt.
We should now be a much stronger organisation with the influx of members from Consumer Congress but, so far, I have seen little involvement from them. We must, somehow, gather our resources together and make them all count.
John Brown
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