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In a Beesley lecture to be
given at the Royal Society of Arts on Tuesday, 12 November, Ian Senior,
the well known postal economist, will break new ground by defining
benchmarks against which postal regulators in the UK and elsewhere should
be appraised.
He will conclude that Postcomm should not intervene directly on the prices
charged by any postal operator, including Royal Mail whose prices are
arguably the lowest in the EU, and to cap them to an average of 29.1p
across all services is a fundamentally flawed approach. Instead, he
suggests an original system whereby changes to the prices of all operators
must lie within a defined framework which will give complete pricing
freedom to operators with small market shares while preventing predatory
pricing by Royal Mail or others with significant market shares.
Secondly, Postcomm should not impose arbitrary quality standards on Royal
Mail. Quality of service should be determined by what the market,
particularly big mailers, want and not by what Postcomm thinks they should
have. Third, Postcomm should ensure access by all operators to Royal
Mail's final delivery network at prices that still permit Royal Mail to
make a suitable margin on the work. He will state that Postcomm, and
Postwatch, should be seen as transitional institutions that should hand
over their duties to ordinary competition authorities when the postal
market has been fully liberalised.
Judged by ten benchmarks for good postal regulation enumerated by Ian
Senior, Postcomm currently passes the test on five, could do much better
on one and fails seriously on two with the jury still out on a further
two. Mr Senior concludes that in postal regulation, less is more and that
the risk of having fat cats is far less than that of having dead ones.
Notes to the Editor
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Ian Senior is an economist who broke new ground in
1970 when the Institute of Economic Affairs published his paper in which
he was the first person to argue that the Post Office's letter monopoly
should be removed. Since then he has developed the case in numerous
articles, talks and broadcasts, and it has become widely accepted by the
EU and national governments.
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He is an associate director with Triangle Management
Services.
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The annual Beesley lectures on regulation are
organised jointly by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the London
Business School. The current series is the twelfth.
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Top mail industry leaders will develop these
discussions further during the following 2 days at the UK Mail Summit
being held in London’s Olympia.
Triangle Management Services Ltd, founded in 1984, is today the
pre-eminent independent specialist management services company within the
global mail, express, and logistics sectors. Triangle offers the following
services to clients: Recruitment, Market Research, Consultancy, Mergers &
Acquisitions and Conferences - all focussed on the mail and express
industry sectors. |
