Jun 2011 16

New Research: Royal Mail kept 287 surplus staff on payroll5

The TaxPayers’ Alliance has discovered that 287 Royal Mail employees were last year languishing in a ‘surplus pool’, potentially costing taxpayers over £8 million a year.

The previous year the figure was even higher, with 458 employees on the payroll with no official job title, potentially costing taxpayers almost £13 million.

Staff have been left without specific roles after restructuring. Some have been in the pool for as long as 6 years.

Our key findings were:

  • 287 Full Time Equivalent Royal Mail employees were deemed as surplus in 2010-11
  • In 2009-10 there were 458 surplus staff
  • 2 Royal Mail employees were surplus for nearly 70 months – almost 6 years
  • 53 employees were deemed surplus for over 20 months, or nearly 2 years

Matthew Sinclair, Director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“It beggars belief that so many staff are being kept on the payroll when there clearly isn’t a role for them. This is yet more evidence that Royal Mail bosses are yet to face up to the devastating situation the group’s finances are in. Taxpayers cannot afford to continue to keep paying the wages of surplus employees.”

Click here for the full press release, or see below for the original documentation.

 

Royal Mail Freedom of Information response, including data


Royal Mail initial refusal

 

Royal Mail ‘surplus staff’ policy documentation

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  • Chmsta

    Try asking the same of TfL. they have the same system

  • BUK

    It doesn’t show how many of them are frontline staff or managers/office staff though. e.g LA, MS, CM are all manager administration grades. There are vacancies in the frontline and therefore no surplus staff usually, except for legal reasons.
    The unions and staff have ben fighting managers “gardening leave” for years, butthey are told this is a seperate budget and nothing to do with them.

    Royal Mail is a public company that pays a dividend to the government not the other way around, Governments have always taken their cut whether the business has been in profit or loss, quite often showing a profit before the government took it’s money.

    When the government has sold off Royal Mail and reaasigned it’s £25 billion + pension assets for a quick headline fix in the defecit reduction, where will the consistent money that has been paid by the business into the public coffers come from. What replaces it? people concentrate on the wrong things. This government is hoodwinking too many people.

  • Janusz Ostrowski

    Firstly let me make it clear that except for one Christmas round in my student days I have no personal connection with the Royal Mail. I have, however, bothered to learn how the British government has repeatedly undermined the commercial viability of Royal Mail and the Post Office by peeling off layers of public and business services that would have kept both both companies profitable. Our puppet politicians pander to multi-nationals who wish to dig ever deeper into the UK’s infrastructure and destroy our native and independent employers in the name of EU integration and globalisation. Thus we end up with a situation where, for example, our German-owned gas or electricity bills sky rocket while German customers are actively protected from unpopular price rises. One gets the feeling that we’re here just to get milked! I’m sure the same pattern can be uncovered with our French-owned water, Spanish-owned banks and telephone services. Do people even actually understand who increasingly owns our country? Competition is good but the Royal Mail has been artificially forced to play the game with its hands tied behind its back. Wake up and recognise the fact that our country, which necessarily includes a native infrastructure, is being destroyed. The French have a history of ensuring that their infrastructure stays in their own hands. It’s only common sense after all.
    Now get off the Royal Mail’s case and spread the real story.

  • Leedel20

    why dont you comment on why royal mail subsidises businness mail costs, through the dsa agreement.

  • DonG

    What about the hundreds of surplus senior civil servants the tpa uncovered a few years ago, has anything been done about this or can they still not be paid off? 

    The civil service objective is foremost about keeping jobs for themselves at our expense, on conditions which most taxpayers and certainly self-employed taxpayers do not get.  I wonder how many of the posts whose salaries are “justified” by comparing with the private sector actually ever get filled by people from the private sector?