It has been obliged to back down on some of its draft licence proposals. Postcomm has, for instance, dropped its initial demand for a two-year price freeze and allowed the Post Office to charge rivals a "fair price" for using its infrastructure (fair being a price that reflects the Post Office's own bloated cost structure).As watchdogs go, then, the posties on their rounds would seem to have more to fear from the mutt guarding the front door. Not a single rival operator has so far applied for a licence, either nationally or locally. However, if the Post Office's rivals are to be believed, there are a lot of companies keen to start competing. Of course the Post Office's obligation to deliver to every address in the country at a uniform price needs a degree of protection. But when all else has failed to deliver decent standards of service at the Post Office, the cold winds of competition might just do the trick.Pay conundrum Like a bad penny, the issue of executive pay keeps on returning.

The latest cases to have exercised politically correct investors are the special one-off bonuses awarded to top executives at Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Schroders.The problem is not going to go away. Indeed, to judge by American experience, it can only get worse, with the gap between top and average pay ever widening. The only constraint on executive pay these days seems to be the negotiating skills of the executive involved. Otherwise the sky's the limit.The attitude of the big investment institutions is at best ambivalent. They are constantly paying lip service to the perceived need to curtail boardroom excess, but since so many top fund managers are equally well rewarded for doing little more than keeping up with the index, their complaining doesn't carry much conviction.The same is largely true of the pension-fund trustees that instruct them. Where the chairman of the trustees is a senior executive of the company, there's not much will there to oppose high levels of executive pay.

Government initiatives aimed at addressing the issue seem unlikely to have much effect. Little evidence exists to support the contention that high pay adversely effects performance, so there is a general tolerance ofit, even among underperforming companies.However, the decision by Schroders to award its former chairman, Sir Win Bischoff, a special one-off payment of £5m in recognition of his service to the company seems to belong to a category all of its own. Schroders is a fund-management group, the more so now that it has sold its corporate finance and equities business to Salomon Smith Barney. As such, it is specifically charged by its customers with ensuring good standards of corporate governance.Schroders may not have been among those institutions that so heavily criticised Chris Gent and the Vodafone board for the £5m cash bonus paid in recognition of the Mannesmann deal, but it might well have been.

This is precisely the sort of payment that Schroders and other fund managers are instructed to get all worked up about, and yet here are directors of Schroders making one of their own.Schroders sheepishly points out that the payment will be put to a separate vote of shareholders, but since the money has already been paid, and the company is in any case controlled by the Schroder family, the vote is something of a formality. It is worth pointing out that Schroders still has two classes of share capital - voting and non-voting - which is something it would never tolerate in the companies it invests in. A case of one rule for us and quite another for everyone else, it would seem.By most accounts Sir Win was a decent and accomplished executive. The family to whom he owes his job has good reason to be grateful for his management of the estate Under his watch, Schroders' value increased hugely.

But given the climate, is it really wise to court controversy in this way? Some trustees have been known to cancel their commission for less.Byers/CorusStephen Byers, the Trade and Industry Secretary, is not the free market champion he claims, is he? He's always interfering, or at least attempting to, and with an election just weeks away provided foot-and-mouth doesn't get to the Government first, he's at it again.This time he's decided to back the unions' bid to save jobs in the steel industry by offering to put up half the money required to keep these men in a job for a further year. Anyone would think we were back in the 1970s again, but for the fact that this is presumably just another vote-winning wheeze that Mr Byers knows as well as anyone else will never actually happen.The Government is offering to put up half the money to keep 6,000 steel workers out of gainful employment for a year, but the other half, plus the costs of keeping the steel plants mothballed over that period, will have to come from Corus - total cost to the company, circa £130m That's one stumbling block. Why would Sir Brian Moffat, chairman of Corus, want to bankroll what would in practice be a giant retraining programme, for no one really believes, do they, that these plants will ever reopen again? Nor is it clear whether such a scheme would be legal under European law.Fortunately for Mr Byers, he probably doesn't have to worry about any of these things. By the time it becomes clear that the scheme won't fly, the election will be over, and Mr Byers will be able to blame the proposal's failure on that nasty Sir Brian Moffat.j.warner independent.co.uk. In reality the new power trading system is unlikely to deliver a further reduction in prices In reality the new power trading system is unlikely to deliver a further reduction in prices Today, a new system for buying and selling wholesale electricity will finally go live.