If nothing changes there will be thousands of workers loose out on thier hard earned pensions.Management need to change the whole image of the Royal Mail to succeed and turn this business around. The workplace used to be a happy enviroment, with good public relations and quality of service, now it seems all we are doing is digging a great big hole for us to fall in. I have worked for the Royal Mail for 20 years, and i have never seen the staff so unhappy. Are the senior execs members of the RM Pension Scheme or did they get compensation to leave like senior execs in at least one other company that recently acquired PLC status? How come every couple of years RM need cash for new equipment especially now when so much mail is not being processed by their mail centres and going direct to the delivery offices?ĥ. Also what happened to their stake in the National Lottery that they bought when it started to lose sales?Ĥ.

There were some daft major business investments by Royal Mail in the last few years esp euro parcel companies where big money was lost. What about clawing the fat bonuses back that the senior execs paid themselves when they were hitting their profit target in this period?ģ. Royal Mail enjoyed a contributions holiday for 13/14 years and now the members are threatened with reductions in benefits. I thought the the pension hole was £5B some 4 yrs ago, now it's £6B? How come it's growing when the markets are recovering and there was a report last week that these pension holes were reducing?Ģ. Here's a few questions that need to be answered - perhaps something for a good journalist to get stuck into!ġ. It is almost sickening to know that MPs Pensions are better funded, better protected, and that these nairdowells will never have to worry about their Retirements like the rest of us. The Royal Mail Pension fund, and perhaps many others should be taking these charlatons to court for their failures.ĩ. This and all previous governments have shied away from giving Royal Mail the Capital it needed to build for the future.Ĩ. They are now even taking their own postal business away and giving it to competitors.ħ. They even caused RM/Post Office to lose perhaps a billion pounds by first backing then backing out of elaborate schemes to pay pensions and benefits through a computerised system.Ħ. This New Labour thought to have our Royal Mail & Post Office suffer further by having us face deregulation before any other European Countries thus forcing revenue to be cut.ĥ. The latest Government, New Labour, has made things much worse by extracting wealth from pensions generally through Mr Browns raid on Pension Funds.Ĥ. When, as so many 'owners' of businesses took a 'pension holiday', the Government thus received more 'profit'.ģ. Royal Mail is and always has been owned by the people and run on behalf of its one and only shareholder the Government of the UK.Ģ. So a chill will be sent through the rest of the public sector, where pensions are conspicuously more generous than what's generally available in the private sector.ġ. It is conspicuous that Leighton has received backing from Alistair Darling, the trade and industry secretary, for these proposals. But It's probably unavoidable when the company feels its long term viability is threatened by the £730m annual cost of servicing the fund. Difficult to see how that can be done without reducing the benefits it gives 170,000 working members - or perhaps increasing the costs for them.Īs Allan Leighton, Royal Mail's chairman, said to me this morning, this is big stuff. So the big news today is that Royal Mail is closing its generous final salary scheme to new members and looking to reconfigure the scheme in a way that reduces its financial burden on the company. Ministers were particularly impressed three or four years ago when Royal Mail reduced its workforce by some tens of thousands - which fired up the determination of the Treasury to reduce headcounts and costs elsewhere in the public sector, though so far without notable success. For ministers, the Royal Mail is a kind of giant testing ground for their intermittently bold plans to reconstruct the public sector.

Postmans salary