http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23249466

Utter [LIFTED], makes my blood boil

Frankly it seems like a [LIFTED] investment, I wouldn't dream of buying shares in that hump. They would have done better to simply transfer 100% ownership to the Post Office's own pension fund.

Selling a business that makes £500million a year profit (apparently) for £2billion. How on earth is this a good idea?

What are its future revenue and profit projections?
What level of investment is required to meet those projections?
What return does it promise on equity and investment?
What is its competitive position, and what are its potential and actual liabilities?

Making £500million a year now is just one number. The question is what you do with the company.

One option is to run it like a cigarette manufacturer. Those are all doomed, and therefore are maintained as cash cows with virtually zero capital investment.

The other is to spend probably at least as much on restructuring the company as you did buying it (in this case) and to eat vast losses before you see another profit.

These things affect what price you will be willing to pay for the company. If we demand the maximum it is worth on your assessment, we make it impossible to raise the capital required to revamp the outfit.

If the post office has value to us, that has little to do with its intrinsic value - which would be negative if its pension liabilities were included - and everything to do with the value to our society and economy that its services deliver.

Basically, it would be vastly better for us all if the outfit was sold for £1 to somebody who was going to spend £4 billion on making it lean and productive than it is for us to flog it for a couple of billion to somebody who is going to milk its slowly declining profits for a decade and then flog some shrivelled rump to DHL for a quid.

I heard some mouthpiece for the idea on Radio 4 this morning outlining the fact that if you live outside a major population centre, then you can give up on the idea of a receiving your post 6 days a week.

How many among us would even notice if our post was delivered 3 days a week?
It would probably take me 6 weeks to notice if it stopped altogether.

You could regulate against that, exactly as the utilities are.

You don't think BT would service remote Scottish cottages if it wasn't forced to? One customer like that paying £15 a month actually costs hundreds of thousands.

Personally, just about everything I buy is online! Never mind subscriptions for comics/magazines, rental discs, return items...

I am the same. I even do my food online.

There's a concept that we're losing in this country; that of a 'service'. Not a business, but a service.
For every few hundred people living on outlying islands (some of whom already don't receive post to their door, let alone daily), there are many thousands for who absorb that cost, as they're so densely populated the cost per capita amongst that group is negligible. You offset the cost of the service to the few hundred throughout the hundreds of thousands in the cities. Then by doing so, society is just a little bit better. Why would you want to take that away?

I wouldn't. Most people wouldn't, but there's that obligation to shareholder thing which is why we have regulations.

And why privatisation may not be in the publics interest.

Regulations are useless without enforcement. How is the record of of the regulatory watchdogs that have been set up to oversee previous privatised public services again?

BT are providing services to remote customers, and last I checked my lights were still on. There's been no cessation of service that I'm aware of due to privatisation, and that's what was implied for the postal service.

Remember we used to have several deliveries a day, so it's already crumbled.

Really? Try getting decent speed broadband anywhere outside a population centre. The definition of 'a service' can change over time.


To the population as a whole, no. But to individuals there has been. And there's more to regulation than 'are they doing everything or are they doing nothing'. Things are not quite as black & white as that.


True. But it doesn't change the fundamental question - why should a public service which has gone through a major restructuring and which has recently had £7billion of public money poured into it and is now operating in a financially successful way require privatisation? Vince Cable's justifications were laughable.