Royal Mail is a right royal mess

[funkflex55]

05 Oct 2024
Spectator Life
Kristina Murkett
Royal Mail is a right royal mess
How did our postal service get so bad?
8 October 2024, 5:01am
From Spectator Life


Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two certainties in life: death, and taxes. It turns out there is a third: Royal Mail not delivering post on time. I live in East Oxford, where Royal Mail has not met its target of delivering 91.5 per cent of all first-class mail by the next working day in over five years. The reality is much worse than that: my OX4 postcode seems to only receive letters somewhere between once every two weeks and once a month. This can be a minor inconvenience (it is a bit surreal receiving birthday cards in June when your birthday is in May), or it can be an administrative headache, like the time we received notification that our resident parking permit was about to expire weeks after it actually had. It can also be excruciatingly painful: I am pregnant, and had to wait two very long weeks to find out my baby’s screening test results, because some archaic NHS computer-says-no system meant they had to be posted rather than emailed. Even though my due date is still three weeks away, I am more likely to see my baby before I see my local postman.


Royal Mail has undoubtedly had a difficult few years. Last year it was fined £5.6 million for missing its delivery targets, although this is a rather paltry sum given its revenues were £7.4 billion. Still, it also lost a lucrative delivery deal to the Post Office; recorded operating losses of £319 million in just six months; had to deal with a series of strikes which cost the company £200 million; cut over 10,000 jobs; and was also the victim of a ransomware attack where hackers demanded £65 million to decrypt files. To top off its annus horribilis, the number of letters sent fell by a further 9 per cent, making the service even less commercially viable. Twenty years ago, UK households received an average of 14 letters a week; today it is just four.

Royal Mail was once a hallowed institution, one that could trace its history back to the reign of Henry VIII, through to the novelist Anthony Trollope’s introduction of the iconic red post boxes, all the way to the hugely successful Postman Pat series, once voted the second most popular children’s show of all time. Now, like its former sister company, the Post Office, Royal Mail has become a beacon of British failure, another botched attempt at privatisation where public service has been sacrificed for profit. Long gone are the days of the local postie being the eyes and ears of rural communities. In February, the BBC ran a Panorama documentary called Where’s My Post?, laying bare the scale of the organisation’s failings and featuring bleak scenes of pensioners shuffling through a queue at a local sorting office in a desperate attempt to find lost post (a very modern purgatory), or crying because they had missed operations because their appointment letters had never arrived. There won’t be a person in the country who has not found a red slip on their doormat, telling them there was no one at home for a delivery, when they’ve been in all morning.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the ... oyal-mess/

[TopperGas]

There won’t be a person in the country who has not found a red slip on their doormat, telling them there was no one at home for a delivery, when they’ve been in all morning.

Why would any postie write out a 739 if there was somebody at home??

[pinstripe]

Why would any postie write out a 739 if there was somebody at home??

So we can carry it around the rest of the delivery, of course. The heavier the better I say. Nothing like a bulky 5kg packet in your bag. Sometimes you can get 2 of them on the same loop. My driver says leave them in the van at the end of the loop, but where’s the fun in that

[Mr Rush]

Royal Mail is a right royal mess
How did our postal service get so bad?

I suppose the first best step for problem-solving is to identify the problems before tackling them, but I've seen these exacts points made over and over again. No-one ever moves onto step 2: do something about it.

We throw our hands up, the union opens another tin of biscuits, the government passes the buck to Ofcom, and finally Ofcom sits on their hands.

[pieoftheday]

05 Oct 2024
Spectator Life
Kristina Murkett
Royal Mail is a right royal mess
How did our postal service get so bad?
8 October 2024, 5:01am
From Spectator Life


Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two certainties in life: death, and taxes. It turns out there is a third: Royal Mail not delivering post on time. I live in East Oxford, where Royal Mail has not met its target of delivering 91.5 per cent of all first-class mail by the next working day in over five years. The reality is much worse than that: my OX4 postcode seems to only receive letters somewhere between once every two weeks and once a month. This can be a minor inconvenience (it is a bit surreal receiving birthday cards in June when your birthday is in May), or it can be an administrative headache, like the time we received notification that our resident parking permit was about to expire weeks after it actually had. It can also be excruciatingly painful: I am pregnant, and had to wait two very long weeks to find out my baby’s screening test results, because some archaic NHS computer-says-no system meant they had to be posted rather than emailed. Even though my due date is still three weeks away, I am more likely to see my baby before I see my local postman.


Royal Mail has undoubtedly had a difficult few years. Last year it was fined £5.6 million for missing its delivery targets, although this is a rather paltry sum given its revenues were £7.4 billion. Still, it also lost a lucrative delivery deal to the Post Office; recorded operating losses of £319 million in just six months; had to deal with a series of strikes which cost the company £200 million; cut over 10,000 jobs; and was also the victim of a ransomware attack where hackers demanded £65 million to decrypt files. To top off its annus horribilis, the number of letters sent fell by a further 9 per cent, making the service even less commercially viable. Twenty years ago, UK households received an average of 14 letters a week; today it is just four.

Royal Mail was once a hallowed institution, one that could trace its history back to the reign of Henry VIII, through to the novelist Anthony Trollope’s introduction of the iconic red post boxes, all the way to the hugely successful Postman Pat series, once voted the second most popular children’s show of all time. Now, like its former sister company, the Post Office, Royal Mail has become a beacon of British failure, another botched attempt at privatisation where public service has been sacrificed for profit. Long gone are the days of the local postie being the eyes and ears of rural communities. In February, the BBC ran a Panorama documentary called Where’s My Post?, laying bare the scale of the organisation’s failings and featuring bleak scenes of pensioners shuffling through a queue at a local sorting office in a desperate attempt to find lost post (a very modern purgatory), or crying because they had missed operations because their appointment letters had never arrived. There won’t be a person in the country who has not found a red slip on their doormat, telling them there was no one at home for a delivery, when they’ve been in all morning.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the ... oyal-mess/

Zzzzzzz.......

[Grinder64]

I suppose the first best step for problem-solving is to identify the problems before tackling them, but I've seen these exacts points made over and over again. No-one ever moves onto step 2: do something about it.

We throw our hands up, the union opens another tin of biscuits, the government passes the buck to Ofcom, and finally Ofcom sits on their hands.

Also of course the obvious 'management high five each other because they've delivered another under-budget period of expenditure by reducing staff hours, who cares about the service that people have paid for - just pay me my bonu$$$$$$$$'