The Royal Mail is betraying the very people it is supposed to serve

When’s the last time you bought a postage stamp? Granted, to do that you have to locate a post office which will probably be at the back of an off licence, past piles of confectionery, rather than in one of the handsome municipal buildings where they were once to be found. Having located one, and diligently queued, you’ll be in for a shock. 

The price of a first class stamp is now – wait for it – £1.35; a second class is 85p. It means that posting a letter is now an expensive treat, not a default means of communication. All of a sudden, you abandon plans to buy a pack of 12, and settle for second class rather than first.

But now even that option isn’t viable. Ofcom, which regulates the postal service, is proposing that the universal delivery obligation should be amended so that second class post won’t be delivered on Saturdays. Yesterday, Lindsey Fussell, the indescribably unimpressive group director of communications for Ofcom, declared in a radio interview that “no change is really not an option”. 

And instead of asking her exactly why no change is not an option, the interviewer on the Today Programme, Emma Barnett, asked her why she wasn’t proposing three deliveries a week instead. It turns out that is indeed another option: deliveries on alternate weekdays.

This should inflame rebellion in post office queues. When the price of a second class stamp went up by 10p in March, we weren’t told that we’d be paying even more for a worse service. And when we challenge the pay-more-get-less model, we’re told – as one might a slightly dim child – that it’s because half as many people are posting letters as in 2011. 

What about texts? WhatsApp? Email? News to Ofcom: there’s a reason for the fall in letters sent. Back in 2011, the price of a first class stamp was 46p, a second class, 36p. So, if the price of a service more than doubles (or nearly triples for first class) and the efficiency of the service goes down, fewer people are going to use it, texts or no texts.

The postbox near me used to have a collection at 5pm; now it’s at 9am, in common with all the others. You now have to be up early to catch the post. It’s one of the umpteen reasons why I was solidly with the postal service union when they objected to these “efficiencies”.

Naturally, the owner of Royal Mail, the International Distribution Service, which is now being purchased by the reclusive Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, is all for the cutbacks: “change cannot come soon enough”, it says. What, a worse service for those who can’t afford first class stamps? 

It would have been perfectly possible for the Tory government that waved through Mr Kretinsky’s bid to have told him categorically that if he wanted to purchase the company, then he’d have to fulfil the universal six day delivery service. 

Ofcom is inviting comments on the proposed universal service changes. Let them have it. The address is: “Future development of the postal service, Ofcom, Riverside House 2A Southwark Bridge Road London SE1 9HA”. If, that is, you can afford the stamp. If you can’t, go online.