Proof that Royal Mail no longer delivers a first-class service

For many people, receiving a crop of colourful Easter cards is a delightful highlight of the season. But if you have yet to send yours, I’m afraid there is bad news.

Today, the price of a first-class stamp rises to £1.10 — a 15p increase, up from 95p, that represents a 64 per cent hike in just five years.

But although the thought of shelling out the extra on stamps might have you dragging your feet, now more than ever you should hurry to the postbox. 

Because, as I discovered last week, when it comes to mailing a letter from A to B, Britain’s first-class postal system is no longer a first-class service.

Or, to put it another way, even spending more than £1 on a stamp won’t guarantee it will get to its destination as quickly as it should.

Under rules known as the universal service obligation (USO), Royal Mail has to offer its customers a six-day-a-week, ‘one-price-goes-anywhere’ service.

In practice, that requires it to deliver letters to any address in the UK, Monday to Saturday, at a uniform price.

It is obliged to hit certain delivery targets — a minimum of 93 per cent of first-class letters should reach their destination the next working day after they have been posted.

That is the theory. But the reality is very different. Of almost 150 letters posted from five locations across Britain over the course of a week by a team of Mail reporters this month (on a week when there were no strikes), almost a third were delivered ‘late’. At one address in Glasgow, only six out of 28 letters arrived on time.

While most of the delayed post took two days to arrive, the tardiest letter took six days to reach its recipient — twice as long as even a second-class letter is meant to take.

Not that there was any rhyme or reason to why some letters reached their destination ahead of others.

One letter posted from a London address to my home in Kent — just 56 miles — took twice as long to arrive as one posted on the same day in Scotland, more than 400 miles away.

Equally worrying was the discovery that despite the steady flow of letters being posted, on four out of the seven days, the Scottish address received no deliveries at all (there are no collections or deliveries on Sundays). When a delivery was finally made, 18 letters arrived on that single day.

Our findings will confirm the worst fears of customers. Namely, that if you post an important letter with a first-class stamp, it’s a gamble when it will arrive. 

And that if there are days when no letters arrive, that doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t been sent any post — just that it may not have been delivered.

With growing concerns about the troubled state of the national postal service, consumer groups and politicians are calling for an urgent investigation by regulator Ofcom, which has the power to issues fines for poor performance.

Last month, MPs claimed that Royal Mail was ‘de-prioritising’ letters in favour of parcels and failing to meet its obligation to deliver six days a week.

‘Hiding behind the pandemic as a driving factor in failures at Royal Mail does not cut it,’ said Darren Jones, chairman of the Commons Business Committee.

Matthew Upton, Director of Policy at Citizens Advice, agrees. ‘Royal Mail has been letting consumers down for far too long. Letter delays have worrying consequences, especially when people miss medical appointments or get bills late. We have uncovered millions of people missing such important mail over the past three years.

‘Ofcom must now hold Royal Mail to account and not let the company get away with this level of failure. Enough is enough. It’s time for the regulator to act.’

Whether or not Ofcom decides to launch an investigation, what should worry customers most is that the situation may soon get worse.

Following 18 days of crippling strikes in 2022, negotiations reopened this year between the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents about 115,000 postal workers, and Royal Mail’s bosses. But hopes of a deal have faded, with the union hinting that more strikes are imminent.

That threat prompted the delivery firm’s leaders to issue the extraordinary warning that the 500-year-old company, which is losing £1 million a day, could collapse.

That would potentially see administrators called in and the private firm renationalised, with all the chaos and cost that would bring for customers and taxpayers alike.

Bosses at Royal Mail insist that the dispute cannot just be fixed with a pay rise for its staff, saying the only way to get the service back on track is to fundamentally change the way it operates, to reflect the changing way that British customers now use it.

They say the content of mailbags has altered dramatically since the pandemic. This includes ‘significant structural declines in letter volumes’ — down by a quarter since the pandemic —alongside growing demands for parcel deliveries.

For this reason, they have requested that they should have to deliver letters only five days a week, not six. 

Royal Mail claims this would not affect customers, citing research by Ofcom that suggested a Monday-to-Friday letters service would meet the needs of 97 per cent of consumers.

‘Being required to provide a service that customers have said they no longer need, at significant structural cost to Royal Mail, increases the threat to the sustainability of the universal service,’ a source told the Mail.

But union bosses claim the company is deliberately prioritising parcels over letters because that is the most profitable part of the business. It has described the company’s plans to modernise as ‘Uberisation’ — declaring that it would turn Royal Mail into a gig economy-style employer.

‘A consistent strategy of under-employing workers over the past few years, as well as a dependence on unreliable agency labour, has created huge delivery issues across the country, and in some places could mean that post is not received for days or weeks on end,’ a CWU spokesperson claimed last night.

Speaking to this newspaper on condition of anonymity, postal workers told of their frustration at the state of the service.

‘We have customers complaining to us posties all the time but we can’t do anything about it,’ said a postwoman from the Midlands. ‘There simply aren’t enough posties — and loads are leaving because of the state of Royal Mail and how they are treating us.’

Another postman, based in the South-East, added: ‘We get the blame on the doorstep when letters don’t arrive or arrive late, which isn’t fair because we are working flat out. The whole thing is a mess.’

Of course, for customers the bottom line is how long their post takes to arrive.

The Royal Mail is obliged to measure its performance with quarterly Quality of Service reviews.

These show that following privatisation in 2013, the next-day delivery of first-class post successfully hit or very nearly hit its 93 per cent target until March 2020. That all changed when Covid struck.

In the financial year 2020/21, that figure plunged to 74 per cent because of staff absences and social distancing requirements in sorting offices and delivery vehicles. The following year saw a slight improvement to 82 per cent.

But the performance fell again in the final three months of 2022, when just 54 per cent of first-class mail was delivered the next day. This was largely due to strikes in the latter half of the year that paralysed deliveries in the run-up to Christmas.

Citizens Advice estimates that 60 per cent of UK adults were affected by letter delays, with 6.2 million people missing important mail during the festive period.

While no figures are yet available for the first quarter of 2023, Royal Mail recently claimed that things have been getting back on track. ‘There have been steady weekly improvements in quality of service through January and February 2023,’ said a spokesperson. ‘Recent performance levels are the highest we have seen since last summer.’

Given the absence of strikes and the receding impact of Covid, the assumption was that things would quickly return to normal and the 93 per cent delivery rate would again be achieved. But the Mail’s test-delivery investigation suggests that the reality is very different.

Every day for seven days, I and four reporters posted first-class letters to one another between addresses in Kent, London, Somerset, West Yorkshire and Glasgow. The farthest distance a letter would have to travel was the 440-mile journey from the West Country to Scotland. The shortest was from my house in Kent to an address in North London.

It should be noted that letters are transported across the country by road, rail and air, so it is impossible to know the precise distances they travel between addresses.

Of the 28 first-class letters I received, seven — or 25 per cent — took more than one working day to arrive. The delayed post included letters from each of the other senders.

In other words, there seemed to be no correlation between how far away a letter was sent from and how long it took to arrive.

The worst performance involved the property in Glasgow. On four days out of the seven, it received no mail at all, despite a steady stream of letters being posted there. This meant that of the 28 letters sent, 22 arrived late.

Of the five addresses, only one hit the 93 per cent delivery target: the Somerset property received 26 of its 28 letters within a day of posting.

Perhaps the biggest conclusion is the unpredictability of the service. It is understood that the missed deliveries in the Glasgow area were caused by a higher-than-usual number of staff absences in the area.

Asked to comment on our findings, a Royal Mail spokesperson said: ‘Every item of mail is important to us, and we are very sorry for these reported delays. To give customers the high-quality service they deserve, we need to transform our network and working practices.

‘It is not sustainable for the business to be losing more than £1 million a day. Change cannot continue to be delayed. 

‘That is why we are doing all we can to get agreement with the Communication Workers Union, including making numerous improvements to our offer throughout the negotiations. 

‘We remain committed to getting the right deal, which secures the future of Royal Mail and its workforce — that would be the best outcome for our people, our customers and our shareholders.’

As to the price rise, the spokesperson added: ‘We have to carefully balance our pricing against a continued decline in letter volumes and the increasing costs of delivering letters six days a week to an ever-growing number of addresses across the country.’

Those words are unlikely to elicit much sympathy among cash-strapped Britons, who are paying more than ever before for a service that simply is no longer delivering.