Lost in the post: 18,000 jobs

ROYAL Mail bosses face a grilling by MPs over almost 18,000 'missing' postal workers who have cost the firm £449m.

The powerful Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee will this week demand to know why Royal Mail has made the massive provision for nearly 20,000 redundancies when its books show that fewer than 2,400 jobs have gone.

Committee chairman, Labour's Martin O'Neill, confirmed that MPs want urgent answers from postal bosses after leaders of the Communication Workers' Union called for an investigation into the apparent discrepancy.

There is a growing suspicion that Royal Mail chiefs have been talking up the plight of the industry in the run-up to a national strike ballot on a 14.5% conditional pay offer - a suspicion shared by the regulator Postcomm.

Bosses have warned of the dire consequences of a strike. Management says the company is losing £1m a day and faces massive competition.

Accounts for the year to March show that most of Royal Mail's £611m loss was accounted for by the redundancy provision of £449m.

The bulk of the losses are in the Post Office, while the mail and parcels businesses, where most 'redundancies' have been earmarked, made a £12m profit.

Confusion over the numbers intensified last week when chief executive Adam Crozier said that 13,000 workers had left already. Three months earlier, Royal Mail chairman Alan Leighton said that 16,600 workers had gone.

A Royal Mail spokesman said last week: 'There are now about 210,000 people at Royal Mail and two years ago there were about 230,000.' But audited accounts show that in 2001 there were 217,964 workers, while in 2003 there were 215,567, a fall of only 2,397.

Sources at Postcomm said they tended to believe the unions. One said: 'The word is spin. Royal Mail tends to exaggerate its plight. It's all doom and gloom, but actually mail volumes are increasing and the effect of competition has been negligible.'