Read Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else for Free Online Page B

centre there are cute cartoons of an animal in a white coat and glasses: the Safety Mole. ‘ “Don’t be safety blinded, be safety minded,” ’ Fehilly said. ‘When I started the programme I could guarantee twenty-eight accidents a year – a knock, a bump or a bruise. Last year we had zero accidents.’
    The vast industrial space, made of breeze blocks and galvanised steel and filled with trolleys and sorting machinery, is neat and clean, enabling Fehilly to practise his kaizen powers of vision. He stopped suddenly and pointed to a bit of floor that looked spotless to me. ‘I can see three rubber bands and a label,’ he said. ‘That’s a defect to me now. Five years ago I would just have accepted that. Now my eyes have improved, that’s a defect to me.’ Fehilly has worked with the staff to find solutions to problems they didn’t know were problems. The Gatwick workforce saved a million pounds a year just by hiring an electric truck to replace the laborious heaving of mail trolleys from one side of the plant to the other. They discovered that certain electric conveyor belts were slowing down the people who worked on them and invented a simple, unpowered device that let gravity do the work instead. They found that, for more than a century, nobody had questioned the number of pigeonholes in the frames that mail sorters use to sort letters by region. Why were there fifty-six? Because there’d always been fifty-six. It turned out that entire man-years of pain and muscle strain, not to mention wastedtime, could be saved just by reducing the number of pigeonholes to fifteen and cutting openings at the back as well as the front.
    Yet even with such ingenuity and co-operation, even with the closure of post offices and mail centres and the whittling down of the company workforce from 230,000 to 165,000 in nine years, even at relative peace with the union, even earning £9 billion a year, the Royal Mail was struggling, competing for a shrinking quantity of mail with aggressive competitors, first among them Holland’s TNT. * Unlike its competitors, it was – and is – obliged to hand-deliver to every home and business in the country, from Lerwick to Penzance, six days a week. It couldn’t make more money without modernising faster, and it couldn’t modernise faster without more money. Hence the main official justification for privatisation, a familiar one – that a private Royal Mail would be able to borrow money for itself, privately, whereas a publicly-owned Royal Mail couldn’t be allowed to borrow and add to the government’s debt.
    I wondered what Fehilly thought of the Sandd system, and told him I was on my way to the Netherlands to see how their private postmen operated. Fehilly didn’t see why it couldn’t work in Britain. ‘We can prepare the mail for delivery,’ he said. ‘We can go and deliver a sack of mail to some mother’s house who’s just dropped her kids at school, she can spend two or three hours delivering mail in her area – it’s a model we’re aware of and would like to use. We’re stuck with a large workforce … [the Dutch model] is a model we’ve spoken of and would like to do in the future.’
    I sensed Simpson, standing at my shoulder, prickling nervously. ‘We’d certainly have to agree that with the unions,’ he said.
    ‘Of course, yes. But why not?’ Fehilly persisted. ‘I’d say, in the future, why not look at these models if they’re more efficient?’
    It’s not easy to understand what happened to turn the Netherlands into a test bed for a private postal service. Inprivatising their own royal mail the Dutch, who for some reason have an image in Britain and America as vaguely hippyish lefty liberals, went one step further than Margaret Thatcher ever did. The Dutch establishment weaves a subtle web of complicity and patronage that binds its members together over generations, discouraging discussion of the past with outsiders. Ruud Lubbers, who as prime