“Hi I haven’t received anything.” “Where is my DVD, I placed the order 14 days ago.” “Never got DVD. Probably lost in the mail.” “Please refund me.”
These are the types of messages that Charlene Leworthy, an eBay seller in Hampshire, gets increasingly frequently – which she finds disappointing, but unsurprising.
Leworthy, who relies on second-class letters to power her small e-commerce business selling DVDs of vintage films, which was launched seven years ago, said Royal Mail kept increasing prices but “the service was the worst I’ve known”.
“Since December it has cost us £600 in refunds for delayed and lost post,” said Leworthy. “That’s money we’ve got to write off. It comes straight off our bottom line, we don’t get that back. It’s a joke.”
Royal Mail, which was privatised in 2013 and its parent company subsequently renamed International Distribution Services (IDS), has struggled to make deliveries on time in recent years. IDS said first-class mail arriving within one working day dropped to 76% in the three months to 29 September, below the 93% target; second-class mail arriving within three working days fell to 93%, short of the 98.5% goal.
Missed delivery targets have led Ofcom, the communications regulator, to fine Royal Mail more than £16m over the previous 18 months. And now – with a £3.6bn takeover of IDS by the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský nearing completion – Ofcom has said rules should be relaxed, with Royal Mail allowed to deliver second-class letters on alternate weekdays and stop Saturday deliveries.
Leworthy said she had had to increase prices, from £1.99 a DVD to £3.50, with a further rise to £4 expected in April. “Because the cost of living has gone up, so we need to earn more anyway just to get by, and postage costs have just skyrocketed.”
First-class stamps cost 76p in 2020, but by last year Royal Mail had raised them to £1.65. “Because it’s gone private and it’s not public any more, it’s just all about profits,” Leworthy said. “They’ve said, screw the service, we just want money.”
The small business owner was one of scores of people who got in touch with the Guardian to share their experiences of the postal service. They told stories of delayed medical letters, small business disruption and unreliable mail that arrived in clumps, while postal workers said they had been told to cut overtime shifts. But there were also positive experiences of packages arriving quickly, suggesting patchy service and discrepancies in different regions.
Colin Stone, in Manchester, said postal delays had created chaos while trying to care for his daughter, Helaina, 30, who has Costello syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that means she needs frequent NHS appointments. “Letters are regularly delivered late or lost,” he said.
“Two weeks ago, we got a whole week’s post in one day,” Stone said. “We have missed appointments or had to reschedule them because letters have arrived on the day of the appointment.”
Last October, Stone, 68, who also has his own health issues, had scheduled a hospital cardiology scan. “I got to my appointment in good time, with the letter in my hot, sweaty little hand, only to be told they’d sent a letter out cancelling it,” he said. “It’s very stressful and very frustrating.”
Stone believes postal workers on the ground are friendly and try their best, but they’re “fighting a system that’s not their fault”. He and his wife also run CostelloKids, a registered charity that relies on Royal Mail, and he said he frequently saw mail with a four- or five-day-old postmark.
The situation inside the company was one of dropping standards but rising prices, said John*, a postal worker in Plymouth. “When I first joined Royal Mail 10 years ago, leaving just one letter behind meant going down a conduct code,” he said. “Now whole areas don’t go out for days.”
John said in 2025, management had encouraged staff to stop taking on overtime – which can often be paid at a higher rate for the first 10 hours – which he said would increase delays even further, meaning letters got left behind.
For John, who said he averaged about 50 hours work a week, not being able to make on-time deliveries “really hurts. It’s our job to deliver these important bits of mail to people. We deliver to old people’s homes and things like that.”
Underinvestment was the major problem, he said. “The service is going downhill rapidly again.”
A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “We are sorry if customers have experienced delays. We deliver millions of letters and parcels throughout the UK every single day and the vast majority arrive on time.” They said Royal Mail tracked the quality of service and had a process to “optimise the delivery of NHS mail when and where there is local disruption”.
Asked about overtime, they said: “January is one of our quietest months and there is far less demand as fewer people send parcels and letters. For that reason, it makes sense as a business to adjust our use of overtime where necessary. There is no ban on or end to overtime.”
Not everyone who responded to a Guardian callout reported negative stories with the postal service – which underlined how service experience can vary dramatically across different areas.
“I absolutely love my postie, he’s the best,” said Emily Schroeder, 46, an American landscape architect living in a Kent town with her six-year-old daughter.
The service has been “exceptionally good”, Schroeder said, with fast Royal Mail delivery times – which she makes use of frequently, selling her daughter’s outgrown clothes online.
Schroeder said a friendly postal worker could be like the glue that connects different aspects of a town. “I’ve gotten to know him,” she said. “As a single parent living in a foreign country [the postal service has been] an integral component of my life here which has helped anchor me and feel a part of community.”
When her daughter’s passport arrived on 21 December – just in time, before Christmas slowed deliveries, for their flight on 26 December – her postman “was just as excited for us to receive it as I was!” she said.
*Name has been changed
