RMCtv : Royal Mail's professor debunks 'Citizens Advice' news stories on delayed mail

[POSTMAN]

Mark Briers

My name is Mark Briers and I am Royal Mail's chief data and analytics officer.

Now you may also not know that I am a professor of statistics. so when I talk about statistics and data, I genuinely do know what I am talking about, and it is within this context I wanted to talk about the articles published today.

But before I do that, let's just look at the data that we published as Royal Mail.

We know of in January quality service in certain parts of the country wasn't what we wanted it to be

And we know why that is, we can link it back to the fact that we had fifteen thousand people, fifteen thousand of our team unable to work, and a large proportion of that was due to covid related absence.

So in certain areas of the country had high numbers of people off because of covid, and that's understandably going to impact for periods of time and quality service

So now we can see as the trajectory of the pandemic has softened, we can see that quality of service coming back across the whole country, and that's due to the hard work of each and every one of you.

So when I see articles of the type being provided and published today, I wanna make sure that the narrative is correct. that's one of the jobs that I strive to undertake at Royal Mail

So I've been working very constructively with the citizens advice in order to understand the statistics and try to get the narratives to where it needs to be.

And I should say that you know, the citizens advice bureau is an amazing organization.
It acts on behalf of each and every one of us, and we want to continue to work constructively with citizens advice, and other organizations to make sure that we deliver as Royal Mail to promises that we make to our customers each and every day.

But we need to make sure that the narrative is right, so let us reflect on this article a little bit.

There are a whole number of statistical reasons why the numbers don't stack up, and I just give you one example that
I have worked through, many of these examples I could do but in the interests of time, I'll just give you one.

The example I want to give you is the fact that when you look at health care appointments missed if you look through the numbers that are implied by this article, the number is quite large as a large number of implied, missed health care appointments as a result of mail delay.

And that number to me didn't make sense, so I went on the NHS website and I found the number of consultants and appointments or referrals and the number of GP appointments across the whole of December, and when depending on how you define health care appointments, which I won't go into the details of you can actually get a logic flaw through one lens.

You can see that the number of people who missed health care appointments in this article was more than the number of health care appointment referrals that the NHS is providing in the whole of December, that just doesn't make sense to me.

And so this ambiguity in this article needs to work through, so we've asked citizen advice to provide us with certain statistical measures, confidence intervals, and margin of error, so we can undertake, repeat the analysis that they've done and align it to the data that we see because of the moment the two don't align.

So just wanted to let you know. that we're working hard to make sure that these narratives are as clear, and as precisely this should be and in this particular case, this narrative to me, individually and professionally just doesn't stack up.

The focus for all of us is on quality of service delivery. we see that in our own data that is getting back to the levels that we all want it to be and that's represented in the data so I'll work as hard as I can and I know everybody in team Royal Mail is working as hard as they can to get us back where we need

Thank you very much.

[claretandblue]

"The Minister for disinformation"....

[sindba]

Bloody hell, that is so badly written apart from anything else.

It scans like one of those emails from a Nigerian prince asking for a million dollars.

[oypostie]

and what about all the duties that were failing last year due to lack of staff caused not by sickness but by a block on recruitment. Do these people have no shame

[clashcityrocker]

Mark Briers
My name is Mark Briers and I am Royal Mail's chief data and analytics officer.
Now you may also not know that I am a professor of statistics.

I didn't even know we had a chief data and analytics officer.
I have never heard of Mark Briers.
I wonder how much he is on.

[theotherone]

I don't think he read the article.

"The example I want to give you is the fact that when you look at health care appointments missed if you look through the numbers that are implied by this article, the number is quite large as a large number of implied, missed health care appointments as a result of mail delay."

It doesn't give a figure of how many appointments were missed or actually they were missed because of delays.
2.5 million is being kind if only talking about delays.

[Phantom]

Absolute horse s**t!

There was never a drop off in mail arriving to delivery offices before, during and after Christmas which only means one thing and that mail centres were staffed correctly or near enough using agency workers but delivery were left with nothing?????? this was a choice based on costs and the fact they could hide behind covid to save money.

Professor of spin can f**k right off!

[POSTMAN]

Mark Briers
My name is Mark Briers and I am Royal Mail's chief data and analytics officer.
Now you may also not know that I am a professor of statistics.

I didn't even know we had a chief data and analytics officer.
I have never heard of Mark Briers.
I wonder how much he is on.

There is a whole department of data peeps.

[POSTMAN]

Bloody hell, that is so badly written apart from anything else.

It scans like one of those emails from a Nigerian prince asking for a million dollars.

RMCtv features are usually the text from a video.

[fb1969]

" I genuinely do know what I am talking about"

Not sure why any professional person would feel they have to say this, unless they were about to come out with a load of bullshit.

[Mr Rush]

How I wish I could believe any of this, but that would require me to instead ignore what I see with my own eyes.

[Sundodger]

Mark,

Perhaps you should stop comparing apples with pears.

Statistics is an art to make whatever data matrix you have be the one to appear superior, by introducing additional sources you wish to invalidate, and then create a matrix showing your data is the more accurate - but it will only be that accurate for a particular point in time, however, it will not be representative of the entire picture.

EG. you want to show that an EV vehicle is the fastest production car ever and will beat an F1 car from 0 to 90mph. That part may be true, but beyond that 90mph or for range, it is an entirely different story

[panzer4]

LIES
DAM LIES
STATISTICS
In that order

[theotherone]

Today we issued our Universal Service Obligation (USO) Quality of Service report for Q3. During Q3 we have delivered 93.8 per cent of Second Class mail within three working days and 76.8 per cent of First Class mail the next working day. 92.5 per cent of First Class mail was delivered within two days of being posted.

76.8% is appalling no way can you put that down just to Absence, so in relation the CA article 2.5 mill is probably a conservative estimate.

[dtyssmshdchrb]

Mark Briers
My name is Mark Briers and I am Royal Mail's chief data and analytics officer.
Now you may also not know that I am a professor of statistics.

I didn't even know we had a chief data and analytics officer.
I have never heard of Mark Briers.
I wonder how much he is on.

4 brownies, at least.