Making deliveries

On one level, IncentiveDirect are a logistics company. We ship stuff, all across Europe. We have a deep and wide relationship with an array of couriers, box shifters, men with ven, and postal services, both for deliveries and collections.

We've seen delivery charges rise sharply over the last year. Perhaps due to the recession, perhaps due to rising fuel costs, it seems that these days delivery companies are less happy to lose on the swings and win on the roundabouts. In other words, few couriers will now accept that they will make less money delivering to the out of the way destinations than the closer to home destinations. Instead, not only have they ramped up overseas delivery charges, they have brought in an array of additional surcharges to deliver to anywhere off the beaten track in the UK. It seems that if they have to cross a body of water, then the price increases dramatically. Deliveries to the islands of Scotland for instance, will attract surcharges, as do the Scilly Isles and the Channel Islands, but now so does Northern Ireland. Some couriers even add a surcharge to deliver to the Isle of Wight. We're even seeing the Scottish Highlands being treated differently from the rest of mainland Britain.

In our iD-points online incentive system, the price that users pay in points needs to cover the cost of shipping, so we need to know the cost to ship an item to the users destination, before they order it. This year we have spent a lot of time tweaking our system so we can manage these additional shipping costs to non-mainland UK destinations.

The only provider which still offers a 'universal service' to the whole of the UK is the Royal Mail, which is bound to deliver to the whole of the UK for the same cost. Meanwhile an array of providers have come in to cherry-pick the lucrative mail contracts, which may be able to offer a cheaper service for some deliveries, but whose costs and surcharges rapidly escalate if the delivery is beyond central England. In a deregulated business environment, this is perhaps inevitable, but it is not a level playing field for the Royal Mail.

On the whole, the Royal Mail offers a fantastic service, at a price that no other provider can match. It's in everyone's interest that we have an efficient national postal service in the UK, offering a universal service, and that can continue to provide a quality service at a reasonable cost. We hope that its staff and management can resolve their differences, and work together to help Royal Mail to improve its service further.