Gatepost an option as An Post fails to deliver profits

AN POST chief executive Donal Curtin yesterday urged people to fit post boxes to their garden gates.

The move is designed to reduce company losses by cutting delivery costs, especially in rural areas with small, scattered populations.

Mr Curtin said: “It’s a very sensible suggestion. I have one and find it very convenient.”

An Post is on an economic knife edge. Every cost- cutting option is being looked at as the company battles losses expected to top €30 million this year. In 2003 the company’s operating loss hit €43m.

An Post wants to move to garden gate boxes after studying a pilot project which sampled 18,000 Co Sligo customers.

“In a lot of countries it is now mandatory when you get planning permission, if you are over 20 metres from the roadway, that you install a garden gate post box,” Mr Curtin said.

“It is a simple, uncontentious issue and maybe in reconstructing this company and in seeking efficiencies we might start with the sensible,” he said.

However, Mr Curtin made clear customers must pay for their post boxes.

“Voluntary roadside boxes are not an economic proposition,” he said. Even if people fitted the gate boxes, the post office would still be left with the problems of population dispersal and the cost of rural deliveries.

But Mr Curtin effectively ruled out having people collect their mail from post offices. He said this option “is so far removed from the ideal of service that we have in this country that it is not part of company current thinking”.

An Post hopes to get sanction from ComReg to push up the price of the standard letter stamp by 7 cent to 55 cent.