The Green Paper on Postal Reform (Department of Trade and Industry, 1994) was a United Kingdom government draft plan to privatise and regulate the UK postal services. It set out various options, the key points of the plan being,
- writing into law a universal service obligation for 6 day a week delivery and "affordable" prices
- a new independent regulator enforcing standards in a new Citizens' charter
- keeping Post Office Counters (now Post Office Ltd) under the same arrangement, with 19,000 privately run offices and 800 Crown offices
- introducing more competition by further reducing the postal monopoly from £1
Then it laid out the different options for consultation of,
- a 100% privatisation in a Stock Exchange flotation to the public and employees, making the Royal Mail a public company,
- a provisional conclusion to privatise Royal Mail and Parcelforce, with the government retaining 49% of shares in private companies, or,
- giving more commercial freedom to Royal Mail and Parcelforce while leaving them in public ownership.
In the event, the plans did not go through. It met with support from Post Office managers, who advocated full sale because in their view this was the only way to achieve commercial freedom. It met with opposition from unions, much of the public and backbench Conservative MPs.
Read more about Green Paper On Postal Reform: Debate, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words green, paper, postal and/or reform:
“Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A cow does not know how much milk it has until the milkman starts working on it. Then it looks round in surprise and sees the pail full to the brim. In the same way a writer has no idea how much he has to say till his pen draws it out of him. Thoughts will then appear on the paper that he is amazed to find that he possessed. “How brilliant!” he says to himself. “I had no idea I was so intelligent.” But the reader may not be so im pressed.”
—Gerald Branan (1894–1987)
“This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose.... In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires....”
—Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)