Royal Mail faces a reckoning with a public it holds in contempt

If you’ve ever rummaged through a box of old postcards at an antiques fair, you might have noticed not only the quaint images from the 1890s or 1900s, but the extraordinary messages on the back: “Dear Cissie, Elsie and I will come for tea today. Will arrive about 4.30. Yours, Edith.” Today! Incredibly, they would post a card in the morning and it would arrive across town a few hours later. Imagine that.

Nowadays, Cissie would probably be caught on the hop if Elsie and Edith tried to warn her by post of their arrival even in two weeks’ time, so rarely does a letter come the following day. And when the card did arrive, Cissie would be in no mood for whipping up one of her Victoria sponges by teatime: instead she’d be livid that she had been forced to pay a £5 penalty to collect the post because Royal Mail had decided the stamp was counterfeit.

Ever since the postal system switched entirely to barcoded stamps last July, people have been reporting that they are having to pay £5 fines, on the grounds that the stamp on their post is fake. It came to a head at Christmas when large numbers of complaints emerged as people were being asked to pay a fiver a time for many of their cards.

While Royal Mail says that it uses specialist equipment at sorting offices to check whether a stamp is genuine or not, buyers of the stamps say they bought them in bona fide post offices, and poor old beleaguered postmasters – already reeling from the false accusations of the Horizon IT scandal – are outraged at being in the dock again. It has become shockingly clear that this new system was introduced to serve Royal Mail, rather than the customer.

You would have thought that we, the consumer, would be at the heart of the company. Not a bit of it. Instead of working out how it could reform its business to meet its obligations to the public, it was revealed yesterday that Royal Mail wants second class letters to be delivered just every other weekday. With stamp prices continuing to increase year by year – first class went up by another 10p this week, to £1.35; second class to 85p – would it be so wrong to conclude that Royal Mail is seeking to squeeze as much money as it can out of its letters business, while running it down so that it can focus on far more profitable parcels?

But around 19 million letters a day are still sent in this country, despite all the other ways we have of communicating with one another. Indeed, there are times when these alternative methods just won’t do. Lawyers still send letters, as do the authorities if you’ve committed a speeding offence. My magazine subscriptions come in the post – though often late. Occasionally they don’t appear at all and the subscription departments never seem surprised when I report it. It’s not like I’m in a hard-to-find cottage off the beaten track in Scotland: I’m in a London suburb on a street with clearly marked, numbered houses.

Then there are the very personal messages we still need to send by post: the card sent by the elderly to a faraway, beloved grandchild; the letter of condolence after a bereavement. An email, or God forbid, a text, would seem wholly inappropriate at a time of grief. It’s then that we need Royal Mail to – yes – deliver.

If it won’t, the regulators and the Government ought to be doing something about that. They shouldn’t be conspiring in the slow demise of a service that British people have relied on for centuries.