Royal Mail boss Simon Thompson reinventing post for internet age

Postboxes up and down the place are sporting crocheted ‘toppers’ of Queens, crowns and corgis to rejoice the Jubilee. 

But Royal Mail, now a stock marketplace company with hundreds of compact investors, traces its historical past again to a a great deal earlier Monarch, Henry VIII, who appointed Sir Brian Tuke as the 1st ‘Master of the Posts’ in 1516. Now, below its new main govt Simon Thompson, the small business is at a crossroads as the use of letters dwindles absent in the digital age. 

The postal services is a small wonder that we just take for granted, Thompson says. In between them, Royal Mail’s 90,000 posties walk much more than a billion actions each individual day, offering to 31million addresses. 

On a mission: Simon Thompson suggests he is investing in automation and persons

‘You can adhere a little something in a person of our 110,000 postboxes and it will get to its location. It is an accomplishment, it is astonishing.’ 

Be that as it may perhaps, getting Britain’s best postie is no effortless career. 

The obstacle proved far too considerably for Thompson’s predecessor, German businessman Rico Back again, who stop immediately after bruising battles with the unions. Revelations in the Daily Mail that Herr Again had been functioning the organization from his £2.3million residence overlooking Lake Zurich in Switzerland for the duration of the Covid crisis did not help. 

Thompson, 55, whose previous roles contain senior positions at Ocado and HSBC, took above at the commence of past 12 months. 

A miner’s grandson from Darlington in County Durham, he is neither remote nor grand. 

Discovering himself not able to retain the services of a car or truck for a perform journey from Hereford to Llandrindod Wells during the pandemic, he commandeered a red put up van fairly than resort to a chauffeured limo, rather to the indignation of Brian, its regular driver. 

He also relished a shipping round in his house town. It became a journey down memory lane as it involved the terrace houses of Falmer Highway, in which his paternal grandfather ‘Tot’ Thompson, who was fiercely loyal to former miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, experienced lived. 

‘I rang my mum to explain to her. She reported, ‘Don’t you have people today to do that for you?’ ‘ 

Joking apart, Thompson has his do the job reduce out. He is up towards cutthroat levels of competition, interminable industrial disputes, a falling share price tag, a billionaire Czech investor with a incredibly massive stake – oh, and force for greener deliveries. 

This week, he will start a new environmental approach to deliver forward Royal Mail’s internet zero carbon emissions target by 10 decades to 2040. The aim is to slash the typical emissions per parcel delivered in the British isles noticeably – to all-around the very same as making a cup of tea with milk. 

But inexperienced ambitions, crucial while they are, will not be enough to safe Royal Mail’s potential. Royal Mail formally break up a ten years back from the Article Office and it is the latter, not the business enterprise Thompson runs, which is becoming hit by strike motion this weekend. 

In the same way, Royal Mail is not implicated in the detrimental scandal that engulfed the Post Office environment above previous sub-publish masters who have been wrongly accused of fraud. 

The company, requires to earn the assist of its staff for the modernisation strategies to do well. ‘Last year, our disputes were being down by 75 for every cent – we are pleased about that,’ Thompson says. 

‘Our people are struggling with the exact same cost of living pressures as everybody else, but it truly is not just about pay out, it is about the transform that will fund the fork out rises. That is where by our discussions are with the unions.’ 

The core of Thompson’s problem is that the golden age of the letter, epitomised in WH Auden’s popular poem Night Mail in 1936, is absent, by no means to return. 

The handwritten epistles of that period – ‘The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring/The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring’ – are, significantly a lot less evocatively, tapped out on a keyboard and whoosh by means of the ether by email. 

‘There were 20billion letters sent in 2004-05, and now it is 8billion,’ Thompson says. ‘The trajectories are definitely very clear. Far more than fifty percent our revenues are now from parcels. We are a parcels business enterprise that also does letters. In the psyche of the company, it is a large improve.’ 

Will clients have to fork out far more? The value of a very first-class stamp was recently elevated by 10p to 95p and 2nd-class has long gone up by 2p to 68p. Thompson admits there may perhaps be more selling price hikes to occur. 

‘With the inflationary actuality out there, we will just have to keep wanting at it,’ he states. 

He is keeping forth in Mount Pleasant in London, a former Victorian jail that now serves as the principal mail processing centre for the money. New parcel sorting equipment are remaining installed with an intelligent procedure of conveyor belts and scanning engineering. It is element of a multimillion-pound expenditure programme, aiming for 90 for each cent parcel automation by 2023-24. 

Put up lady: The Queen is adorning postboxes about the region

‘This device,’ he states, ‘is capable of accomplishing 7,500 parcels an hour with ten operators. As a result of guide processing, it would be about a 3rd of that.’ 

Is not going to some team drop their positions as a result of the modifications?

‘We are investing in automation and in people as properly. It needs fewer people today, but in conditions of safeguarding work opportunities in the upcoming, it is good due to the fact it would make the business enterprise more sustainable.’ 

The fleet of delivery vans is likely electric powered as element of the push to go inexperienced. ‘By spring future calendar year, we will have 5,500 electrical vehicles, a lot more than one in 10,’ Thompson states. ‘The gas value is 73 for each cent reduced and routine maintenance 37 for every cent decreased.’ 

The company has also been hoping out e-trikes and golf buggy-design modest electric powered cars as well as drones, which will focus at initial on island communities on the Scillies, Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides. 

Boots on the floor are continue to greenest of all, Thompson claims. ‘We appreciate the simple fact the write-up is on foot. We go everywhere each and every day.’ 

Royal Mail floated on the inventory current market in 2013 and all around 20 for every cent of its share capital is owned by compact investors and workers.

They must be grinding their teeth that the shares have sunk by nearly 43 for every cent this calendar year, after climbing in the pandemic. Not only are they languishing down below the £3.30 flotation cost, but the business has also just been ejected from the elite FTSE100 Index of major shares. 

Thompson would not be drawn on the share effectiveness, expressing ‘we are shifting the small business so we can compete, and that is what I am targeted on’. Nor will he focus on the stake held by Czech businessman Daniel Kretinsky, who has around 20 per cent of the shares. 

Would it issue if Royal Mail were taken around by an abroad predator and it misplaced its identification as an independent British organization? 

‘Those ideas do not go in my head. I have to reinvent Royal Mail for the up coming technology, that is what I am anxious about. I you should not consider Royal Mail has a divine proper to exist, not at all, even though I do consider it is a business that culture desires to exist.’ 

We may well all be sending fewer letters, but if he could article just one to anyone, alive or useless, who would it be? ‘My grandad,’ he says.

‘I would likely check with him, ‘Tot, what do you believe of what I am undertaking?’ I would talk to him if he is Okay that I am in management. I’m not positive he would be.’