Graham Corbett
Inaugural chairman of Postcomm who oversaw the most turbulent period in the Royal Mail’s history
GRAHAM CORBETT, who has died aged 83, was, from 2000 to 2004, the first chairman of Postcomm, the postal services regulator, during which time he became involved in a series of bruising battles with the Royal Mail, postal unions and politicians; none the less, he succeeded in limiting Royal Mail’s price increases while overseeing the orderly introduction of competition to Britain’s postal markets at a pace ahead of most other European countries.
The Royal Mail had enjoyed a monopoly for 350 years, but at the time Corbett was appointed, this was expected to end under EU plans to drive through liberalisation of postal services across Europe. Postcomm was set up by the Labour government to meet the challenge of opening up the postal market to competition, improve the poor service provided by the Royal Mail – and keep the whole process at a distance from ministers.
As Corbett, a wheelchair-using former accountant, observed to the Lords Constitution Committee in June 2003: “One of the reasons for wanting to set us up in the first place was that the government simply had no appetite for having to take the rather disagreeable decisions that were necessary to move the Royal Mail forward … in so far as we can do things which government was not readily able to do.”
His first crisis surfaced a few months after his appointment, in late 2000, when he discovered that the Government had been holding secret talks with the Dutch postal service with a view to selling it to the Royal Mail, then (briefly) known as Consignia. Regulating a postal service that had been sold to foreign owners had not been part of his job description, and he moved quickly to establish the authority of his new office by opposing the sale on the grounds that there was no evidence that it would produce benefits for users.
A turning point in his relationship with the DTI, by his account, came when Patricia Hewitt, the trade and industry secretary, asked him if he and the other members of the Postcomm board intended to resign. “I said, ‘We won’t resign, you will have to sack us’,” Corbett recalled.
In his four years at Postcomm, Corbett oversaw one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the Post Office. In 2001 Royal Mail incurred a loss of £1.2billion. As a result the government called in new management led by Allan Leighton, the combative former boss of Asda, to revive the loss-making company.
While Leighton and Adam Crozier, the chief executive, launched an ambitious recovery programme involving a cull of 30,000 jobs, Corbett drove through the first stages of opening up the postal services market to competition, his bitter clashes with Leighton over price controls and the pace of liberalisation becoming the stuff of City legend.
Leighton pressed for Britain to follow the European route to liberalisation – lowering the monopoly bulk mail weight limit in stages; it was a strategy that would have played into the hands of the incumbent operator. Corbett maintained that the customer would be better served by abolishing the monopoly altogether – then licensing rival operators to enter the market in stages.
For three years he largely resisted the public relations barrage mounted by the Royal Mail and its unions, and withstood arm twisting from the government and backbenchers to go easy on the postmen. In 2003 he demonstrated Postcomm’s muscle by fining the Post Office £7.5million (a record for any regulator at the time) because it was unable to meet the 2002/3 target set for postage paid business post.
The whispering campaign against Corbett culminated in newspaper reports in early 2003 that Patricia Hewitt had succumbed to pressure from Leighton to sack him. In fact the government had agreed to extend his three-year term by another year – to March 2004, Robert Peston speculating in the Telegraph that Corbett had probably been “duffed up by some insidious spinning, presumably by a political genius at the DTI who thought that undermining the regulator would win a few cheers from the Communication Workers Union.”
In 2003 around 30 per cent of the market – the biggest bulk mailouts by businesses of letters costing less than £1 to post – was liberalised and by the time Corbett stepped down plans were in hand for a full liberalisation of the mail market. Even Leighton grudgingly conceded that the struggle had had a positive outcome, telling an interviewer that Corbett had “battled along the way and adjusted some of the thinking. We’ve ended up at the right place but it wasn’t where he started and it wasn’t where I started.”
Graham Corbett was born on November 6 1934 to John and Greta Corbett. After education at Stowe, he trained as a chartered accountant and in 1959 joined the accountancy firm Peat Marwick. Over nearly 30 years with the company he became heavily involved in the development of the accountancy profession’s auditing and accounting standards. From 1975 to 1987 he was the Senior Partner of Peat Marwick’s Continental European firm based in Paris.
He then moved to the commercial world, becoming chief financial officer and a main board director of Eurotunnel, the UK’S most challenging construction project of modern times, arriving there on November 2 1987, one week after Black Monday and two weeks before a prospectus for a massive £770million share offer was to be launched. By winning the confidence of underwriters who were facing enormous losses as a result of the BP privatisation and persuading them to underwrite the Eurotunnel rights issue Corbett was largely instrumental in getting the equity the project needed to proceed. With his dry sense of humour and calm demeanour, he was the perfect foil to his explosive chief executive, Alastair Morton.
From 1997 until his appointment as chairman of Postcomm Corbett was deputy chairman of the Competition Commission.
During his teens, Corbett had suffered a spinal injury from a bad fall which only became obvious in his 40s when it caused terrible pain and, after a series of painful treatments and therapies, in the 1990s he was eventually forced to use a wheelchair which, he found, somewhat unexpectedly, afforded him extra freedom.
He developed a small boy enthusiasm for new gadgets and cars adapted for the disabled and from 1998 to 2016 served as chairman of the Research Institute of Consumer Affairs (Rica), which conducts consumer research for older and disabled people. In 1998 he was behind the change of Rica practice to ensure testing went through a panel of those with the disabilities the equipment was intended to target.
Rica can now call on more than 700 people for such panels. He was also instrumental in lobbying for transport to be designed to be accessible to all, instead of the disabled having to rely on modifications. And he was a non-executive director of the disabled employment placement service Remploy at the time it was switching from factory employment to open employment.
His retirement from Postcomm allowed him to devote more time to Rica and to relax at a retreat he owned in Provence.
Corbett was appointed CBE for services to transport in 1994.
He married, in 1964, Anne (née James), who survives him with their two sons.
Graham Corbett, born November 6 1934, died April 27 2018