Royal Mail is a symbol of British failure, where the inept are rewarded and the innocent pay

Royal Mail has been playing the blame game for quite some time now. When the beleaguered company’s former chief executive Simon Thompson appeared in front of the business, energy and industrial strategy committee in March 2023, he pointed the finger at rogue workers carrying tracking devices, which he later admitted were used to pressure them to work faster, in breach of its legal service requirements.

It wasn’t the first time Thompson had appeared before the cross-party committee of MPs. During his first appearance, two months earlier, he struggled for two minutes to answer the question: “Do you recognise the system wide failure that is currently taking place at Royal Mail … yes or no?”, before insisting: “We are definitely doing better.”

The committee subsequently received “hundreds of thousands of emails” raising concerns about the accuracy of his evidence. (Fortunately, the complaints weren’t sent by post, otherwise the then committee chairman Darren Jones might not have received them).

Concerned Thompson hadn’t given “wholly accurate” answers at his first appearance, the committee made him return – but not before swearing an oath to tell them the truth under a warning of contempt of Parliament and a “potential perjury”.

Summing up the theme of that second session, in which MPs accused Thompson of “incompetence or cluelessness”, Jones said: “We have rogue posters, rogue managers, we have isolated incidents, we have a global pandemic, we have industrial action. It is everyone else’s fault, nothing to do with me, guv.”

Two months later, Thompson said it was the “right time” for him to go after Royal Mail finally struck a deal with the main postal union ending a long-running dispute. Sources suggested he had become “increasingly disillusioned” during strike action by members of the Communication Workers Union. He stayed on in his £540,000 role for another five months before leaving in October 2023.

It was a conveniently timed departure. Just over a month later, Ofcom fined Royal Mail £5.6 million for failing to meet its first and second-class delivery targets in the 2022-23 financial year. (That same year, incidentally, Thompson was paid a £140,000 “short term bonus” on top of his hefty salary.)

Royal Mail is required to deliver 93 per cent of first-class post within one working day and 98.5 per cent of second-class mail within three working days, and to complete 99.9 per cent of delivery routes for each day on which a delivery is required. But instead it only managed to deliver 73.7 per cent of first class mail and 90.7 per cent of second class mail on time, while completing 89.35 per cent of delivery routes. 

Ian Strawhorne, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, said: “Clearly, the pandemic had a significant impact on Royal Mail’s operations in previous years. But we warned the company it could no longer use that as an excuse, and it just hasn’t got things back on track since. The company had, he added, “let consumers down”.

In February, a BBC Panorama programme titled Royal Mail: Where’s My Post, laid bare the scale of the organisation’s failings, featuring people who had missed operations because NHS letters never arrived, and showing others queuing at sorting offices in a bid to find lost post.

This week, we learnt that Chinese forgers are now flooding the UK market with fake stamps – leaving unwitting victims having to pay £5 penalties to collect their letters. Having increased the price of stamps by 350 per cent from 30p to £1.35 since 2005, and introduced bar codes to stop customers reusing unstamped stamps, you’d have thought that Royal Mail would have gone to great lengths to make them forgery proof. But in another example of “not me guv-ism”, the company’s director of external affairs and policy, David Gold, admitted this week that the counterfeits were so good even he couldn’t tell the difference, before blaming the Border Force for failing to stop them coming into the country.

He told The Telegraph: “One of the things which is obvious is if these stamps are coming in from abroad, people’s obvious question will be ‘Shouldn’t Border Force just be stopping them?’”

No, Mr Gold. A more obvious question is why Royal Mail, a once august British institution, whose origins date back to the reign of Henry VIII, is being run by such a bunch of complete and utter numpties. These people have one job: to deliver the post on time, and they can’t even manage it. Royal Mail has lost £319 million in the first half of this financial year alone and bosses continue to blame labour disputes – despite there having been no strikes since December 2022.

The truth of the matter is that cuts to “right-size” Royal Mail have resulted in it becoming the wrong size, having haemorrhaged more than 10,000 employees in the past two years. Earlier this month, Royal Mail announced that a further 1,000 jobs could be axed under new plans to scrap second-class letter deliveries on Saturdays.

Some argue that the government-imposed “universal service obligation”, which requires it to deliver to more than 30 million UK premises, six days a week, is an anachronism in the digital age, when people use the postal service less. But if you are charging customers more to send fewer items, then surely you should be able to deliver on deadline?

I hear that Royal Mail is now planning to reduce the amount of post travelling by air – and send it by rail, road, or ship instead, which threatens to cause even more delays. Yet still there has been no acknowledgement from senior management that the company has been badly run for years. Privatisation was hailed as a new chapter in 2013, and now look where we are: cancelling Christmas cards and fining OAPs £5 for unwittingly using forged stamps.

Like its former sister company, the Post Office, Royal Mail has become a beacon of British failure. Much like the stages of grief this sort of abject bungling usually involves five steps. First comes the initial “failure”, be it performance or error. This is normally swiftly followed by the “denial” phase, when senior management repeatedly insists nothing is wrong while continuing to receive generous bonuses. Phase 3 is the “blame” stage, when “the global pandemic”, “industrial action”, even “the customer”, are listed as excuses. Then comes the “lack of accountability” phase, when bosses flail around at select committees and public inquiries passing the buck while exposing their own ineptitude. Such company crises usually culminate in a final “reward” phase, with the CEO inevitably given a golden handshake only to land another plum job – often in the public sector.

No doubt these five stages of failure will be familiar to you if you’ve ever had to deal with an arms-length body or quango. But as Royal Mail’s case proves to our great dismay, the private sector is failing too.