Customers, who can post parcels up to the size of a shoebox, may also request proof of posting and track their parcel using the Royal Mail app. Bad news for post office branches then, but good news for the consumer? Possibly.
Apparently, according to the Royal Mail, there are 115,000 postboxes in the UK located within half a mile of 98 per cent of addresses; that’s quite the network of parcel drop-off points. “Our message is clear, if you have a Royal Mail label on your parcel, and it fits, put it in a postbox and we’ll do the rest,” says a spokesperson.
When and how the Royal Mail might “do the rest” is the question. Rather than crowing about this futuristic innovation, which is clearly set up to challenge the appearance of parcel locker services such as InPost, perhaps the privately-owned company ought to focus its efforts on delivering existing letters and mail on time.
For the third year running, Royal Mail has been fined for missing its annual first and second-class mail delivery targets, leading to millions of letters arriving late across the UK. This year it’s been hit with £21m, the third-largest fine ever imposed by communications watchdog Ofcom.
The UK’s major postal service delivered just over three quarters (77 per cent) of first class mail and 92.5 per cent of second class mail on time during the 2024-25 financial year, Ofcom found.
“Royal Mail must rebuild consumers’ confidence as a matter of urgency,” says Ian Strawhorne, director of enforcement at Ofcom. “And that means making actual significant improvements, not more empty promises.”
These pitiful figures fall far short of its respective 93 per cent and 98.5 per cent targets. And suggest that rather than spend upwards of £1.70, the cost of a first class stamp for a standard letter, it makes more sense to opt for second class, from 87p, because your missive has statistically more chance of arriving within the expected time. Which doesn’t sound like the way to run a profitable business to me.
And they’re simply not good enough. At the start of this month, my daughter, who is a student in Liverpool, checked her postbox every day for the arrival of three birthday cards, sent first class from her aunties in three different locations, Barnsley, Sheffield and Caterham in Surrey.
The Caterham card was posted more than a week ahead of her birthday, because this particular aunty is especially risk-averse and wanted to make sure it travelled the full 240 miles in time. All three cards eventually arrived at once, a full week after my daughter’s birthday. One was MIA (missing in action) for 10 long days.
There is absolutely no excuse for this, except that – as my daughter and I conjectured – there was possibly a delay at the sorting office which meant all three cards were stuck in limbo together somewhere. I put my dark thoughts, that some dodgy person had apprehended the cards thinking there might be money in them, to one side. But frustrations with the postal so-called service will send us all mad in the end.
Cast your mind forward 10 years say. Do you really think that the Royal Mail will still exist in the form we recognise? Or will our streets be littered with broken solar-powered post boxes?
It is clear that the Royal Mail is rapidly being superseded by other delivery services, especially for parcels, but most of us still regard it as the national leader, a safe and trusted pair of hands for our precious correspondence.
Birthday cards by email just aren’t the same, are they? Whilst so much communication is done now by digital means, we do rely on the post to deliver not just personal greetings, but also important documents such as medical, personal finance and legal letters, subscription magazines and letters from loved ones.
For many older people especially, receiving and sending physical mail is vital. At 81, my dad, for example, still does not feel comfortable with email and certainly wouldn’t trust it above the feel of an actual letter in his hand.
The failure of the mail to deliver adds to the general erosion of trust in major institutions that chips away at our way of life.
In its own defence, Royal Mail says it “will continue to work hard to deliver further sustained improvements to our quality of service” which sounds just like the corporate self-serving gobble-de-gook that has got the company into such a tangle. How can it deliver “further” improvements, when for the third year running, it’s failing to deliver a significant proportion of items on time and to its own targets?