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I’d like to tell you about the letters I’ve received from constituents lately.
Not email. Post. The kind that lands on doormats across Solihull.
Except, increasingly, it is landing very late – if at all. Residents are missing hospital appointments because appointment letters are arriving after the appointment date; business owners are losing contracts because time-sensitive documents don’t show up. Constituents are missing important notices because they get bundled up with a week’s worth of undelivered post and dropped through the door all at once – and it’s then too late to act on them.
These are not isolated grumbles. They are symptoms of a system that is failing the people who rely on it most and who can least afford the consequences.
Last month the Business and Trade Committee, launched a snap investigation into Royal Mail’s letter service. And the numbers uncovered show just how widespread the failure really is.
Royal Mail is on course to deliver 219million letters late this year; 126million of those are First Class – for which you’re about to be charged £1.80 and will expect next-day delivery.
Millions will not get it. In fact, a quarter of all First-Class post is arriving late, against a regulatory target of 93% on time. And the price of that stamp? Yes, that £1.80 stamp is nearly three times what it cost a decade ago.
Think about what that means in practice for families. If you’re waiting on a Universal Credit decision letter, a school place confirmation, a prescription, a court notice or a job offer, the post is not a luxury, it is a lifeline. When Royal Mail deprioritises letters in favour of the more profitable parcel business – and our investigation found they don’t even bother recording when they do this – real harm follows for real people.
Ofcom fined Royal Mail £2million in October and demanded an urgent improvement plan. Five months later, Royal Mail still won’t publish it. Meanwhile, the letters keep arriving late, or not at all.
Royal Mail will appear before my committee in Parliament on March 24. I’ll be asking them directly: when is the nation going to get the service it expects?
And how do you look my constituents in the eye, charge them £1.80 for a stamp and tell them that’s good value – when one in four First Class letters doesn’t arrive on time?
If you have been affected by a missed appointment due to late delivery, a lost document, chronic late post, I want to hear from you at [email protected] The more evidence we have from our community, the harder I can push for change.
