Royal Mail is a right royal mess

Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two certainties in life: death, and taxes. It turns out there is a third: Royal Mail not delivering post on time. I live in East Oxford, where Royal Mail has not met its target of delivering 91.5 per cent of all first-class mail by the next working day in over five years. The reality is much worse than that: my OX4 postcode seems to only receive letters somewhere between once every two weeks and once a month. This can be a minor inconvenience (it is a bit surreal receiving birthday cards in June when your birthday is in May), or it can be an administrative headache, like the time we received notification that our resident parking permit was about to expire weeks after it actually had. It can also be excruciatingly painful: I am pregnant, and had to wait two very long weeks to find out my baby’s screening test results, because some archaic NHS computer-says-no system meant they had to be posted rather than emailed. Even though my due date is still three weeks away, I am more likely to see my baby before I see my local postman.

Royal Mail has undoubtedly had a difficult few years. Last year it was fined £5.6 million for missing its delivery targets, although this is a rather paltry sum given its revenues were £7.4 billion. Still, it also lost a lucrative delivery deal to the Post Office; recorded operating losses of £319 million in just six months; had to deal with a series of strikes which cost the company £200 million; cut over 10,000 jobs; and was also the victim of a ransomware attack where hackers demanded £65 million to decrypt files. To top off its annus horribilis, the number of letters sent fell by a further 9 per cent, making the service even less commercially viable. Twenty years ago, UK households received an average of 14 letters a week; today it is just four.

Royal Mail was once a hallowed institution, one that could trace its history back to the reign of Henry VIII, through to the novelist Anthony Trollope’s introduction of the iconic red post boxes, all the way to the hugely successful Postman Pat series, once voted the second most popular children’s show of all time. Now, like its former sister company, the Post Office, Royal Mail has become a beacon of British failure, another botched attempt at privatisation where public service has been sacrificed for profit. Long gone are the days of the local postie being the eyes and ears of rural communities. In February, the BBC ran a Panorama documentary called Where’s My Post?, laying bare the scale of the organisation’s failings and featuring bleak scenes of pensioners shuffling through a queue at a local sorting office in a desperate attempt to find lost post (a very modern purgatory), or crying because they had missed operations because their appointment letters had never arrived. There won’t be a person in the country who has not found a red slip on their doormat, telling them there was no one at home for a delivery, when they’ve been in all morning.

The question is whether Royal Mail should be a social service or a commercial business, as clearly it cannot be both. Its obligation to deliver letters and parcels for the same price to 30 million British households six days a week is both magnificent and completely unsustainable in the digital age. Many have argued that the universal service obligation is now an anachronism, and we should downgrade the official requirement to only delivering two or three days a week (what that might mean for, err, weekly magazine subscribers is anyone’s guess). Only last year, the government rejected Royal Mail’s proposal to drop Saturday deliveries, something that Ofcom forecast could cut costs by £200 million, or £600 million if they went to three days a week.

Once again, we have become an international outlier on this issue. Many other European countries have already made changes to their postal services, either by following a subsidy model (such as Italy and France, which now pays La Poste an additional €500 million a year), or an alternating model, such as Germany, where post is delivered to different regions on a day-to-day basis. While I understand that the government does not want to look like it is rewarding failure, the vast majority of people say they would prefer a less frequent, more reliable service, or, in the case of East Oxford, any semblance of service at all. Royal Mail’s East Oxford Delivery Office is currently only open for two hours each morning (four hours on Saturdays), has a Google review of two stars, and seemingly a phone call wait time of 45 minutes, which gives you an idea about the current levels of customer satisfaction. Given the eye-popping cost of a first-class stamp (£1.65 from yesterday), surely Royal Mail can do better than this?