Royal Mail referred to regulator over letter delivery

ROYAL MAIL’S referral to regulators for failing to deliver letters six days a week is “vindication of why staff have lost total confidence” in the firm’s leadership, a union leader said today.

Communication Workers Union (CWU) general secretary Dave Ward welcomed the business, energy and industrial strategy committee’s decision to refer the strike-hit privatised company to Ofcom, saying the “deliberate running down of the universal service obligation (USO) has actually worsened” in recent months.

The cross-party group said the 500-year-old firm has “systematically failed to deliver” the statutory nationwide obligation and accused chief executive Simon Thompson of giving “not wholly accurate” answers to MPs in two committee hearings.

The report said: “Royal Mail denied any knowledge of the tracking of postal workers using technology and said evidence of managers disciplining workers using such data was due to non-compliance with policy.

“We did not believe that such widespread errors could happen without direct or indirect management approval.”

Bosses must have been negligent if they knew nothing of the practices, said MPs, who urged the information commissioner to check the legal basis of the claims. 

They also asked Ofcom to open an enforcement investigation into the business and report back by December.

Committee chairman Darren Jones said the failure could only be down to “an unacceptable level of incompetence.”

A company spokesperson rejected any suggestion of misleading MPs.

But Mr Ward, whose union launched national strikes over jobs, pay and working conditions at the firm last August, said: “The report vindicates why the workforce have lost total confidence in Simon Thompson and senior leadership.”

Talks on resolving the union’s dispute with Royal Mail would struggle to get workforce support even if an agreement is reached, he said, “unless there is a change of attitude and personnel” at the top.