Cyprus-Forum.com

[Sotos]

BEDEVILED by red tape and insufficient manpower, the Postal Services have once again been fined for their below-par performance.

The department must now pay up a total of £20,000 to the Regulatory Committee for Posts and Communication for failing to meet EU delivery targets.

Despite an improvement over the past year, the Postal Services still have a lot of catching up to do. For next-day domestic deliveries, they fell well short of the 80 per cent target at just 62.5 per cent. That alone cost the department a £10,000 penalty.

Things were even worse when it came to mail coming in from abroad with a three-day delivery deadline: only 38.8 per cent instead of the required 85 per cent. That’s another £6,000 fine.

The remaining £4,000 was imposed for outbound mail. In this case the figures were: 57.4 per cent instead of 85 per cent for three-day deadlines, and 90.5 per cent instead of 97 per cent for five-day deadlines.

The Postal Services are the first to acknowledge their faults, but insist they cannot cope with the workload due to a combination of factors, primarily a shortage of personnel and lack of flexibility in decision-making. The latter stems from the fact the department is a government service.

Cyprus joins San Marino, Jersey, Monaco, and FYROM in being the only countries out of 43 European countries that still have a Postal Service functioning as a government department.
The well-known problems forced parliament to take an interest, and a bill was drafted last year aiming to make the Postal Service a semi-autonomous organisation.

However, the director of the Postal Services Vasos Vassiliou could not be reached for comment yesterday.

[Mikros]

This will eventually happen for most of the government controlled departments...

[Maria28]

I did notice some improvement in the package delivery time over the last few months.

Maybe they didn't meet the targets but the pressure had some positive results on them.

[Mikros]

Of course, but it is time to realise that being part of the Eu does not mean just asking for funds and cheaper cars... We have to follow rules and standards and work with time limits, aka Nicosia General Hospital!