Second-class service! Royal Mail to scrap some Saturday deliveries across major towns and cities in biggest shake-up to services in generations

Royal Mail is to slash postal services across major UK towns and cities next month in the biggest shake up to services in generations, the Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Second-class deliveries on Saturdays are to be axed from homes in London, Bristol, Darlington, Nottingham, Coventry, Salisbury, Winchester, Cardiff and Hull.

Affected towns also include Antrim in Northern Ireland, Stockton on Tees in County Durham, Hexham in Northumberland and Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire.

It means around 1m UK households will only get second-class post on every other working day as part of the six-month trial.

It comes ahead of a huge shake up of the business and sparked fears that some areas will never receive current service levels again.

Royal Mail bosses were accused of ‘jumping the gun’ before regulatory permission to axe second class post on Saturdays has been granted by Ofcom.

And it comes as the 508-year-old postal service is in the process of being bought by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky.

In total, 37 of Royal Mail’s 1,200 delivery offices will be included in the pilot. Households that receive post from those delivery offices will be affected.

One of the sites is the postal service’s flagship mail centre Mount Pleasant, which was once one of the biggest sorting offices in the world, the Mail on Sunday can reveal.

It serves addresses in north and central London.

Dennis Reed, director of the Silver Voices charity for older people, said: ‘The Royal Mail bosses are so keen to cut the standard of our postal service that they are jumping the gun with this so-called trial, before Ofcom approval,

‘This trial will be seen as the thin end of the wedge, The Government seems content for our former world class postal service to be run down’.

Posties working at the affected delivery offices could be in line for voluntary redundancy as the postal service is expecting a surplus of workers during the trial.

Any job cuts would be part of the 1,000 redundancies already expected if changes to the Universal Service Agreement (USO) get the green light from regulator Ofcom this summer.

Currently. Royal Mail must deliver letters six days a week to all 32 million addresses in the UK for the price of a stamp.

Second-class deliveries are set to be axed on Saturdays for homes in London , Bristol, Darlington, Nottingham , Coventry, Salisbury, Winchester, Cardiff and Hull (file photo)

But the postal service has been lobbying for change for four years, saying the commitment costs the business up to £2 million a day.

It says letter volumes have fallen from a peak of 20 billion a year in 2004/5 to just 6.7 billion annually today.

Watchdog Ofcom will consult on the proposal to deliver second class letters every other working day early this year.

A final decision is expected to be made in the summer and the changes could then be rolled out nationally in 2026.