The Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents tens of thousands of Royal Mail employees across the UK, was enjoying hands-on leadership from its General Secretary Dave Ward.
Sitting forward in the same chair occupied during our two previous conversations—the one beneath the framed blue Chelsea football shirt and photo of supportive colleagues—he cut to the chase.
“Since we last spoke,” he said, “there have been two developments. Very significant ones.”
The first, he explained, followed months of letters from postal workers flooding MPs’ inboxes. In response, the House of Commons Business and Trade Committee, chaired by MP Liam Byrne, had written directly to Royal Mail, giving them two weeks to account for what Ward described as “quality of service failures.”
The company had insisted the problems were temporary: staff shortages, sickness, seasonal strain. “There isn’t a single postie,” he said, “who doesn’t know this has been orchestrated.” He stopped short of calling it sabotage. But in his view the deterioration hadn’t been sudden or accidental. It had been three or four years in the making.
The Committee’s letter, he noted, contained “very direct questions.” He added: “It’s going to be extremely interesting to see how they answer.”
What troubled Ward most wasn’t just performance metrics. It was trust. “What’s taking place,” he said, “is damaging the company. Trust with the customer is being eroded.”
He insisted he wasn’t talking Royal Mail down. “It can be a fantastic company,” he said. “But we cannot have people running the company who can’t tell the truth to their customers about why they’re not getting their mail on time.”
He called it “a fundamental development.”
There is a sense, he said, that MPs across all parties are beginning to realise what’s happening—not because of briefings in Westminster, but because of conversations with constituents. Customers are telling them their post hasn’t arrived. Small businesses are saying contracts are being lost.
“I’ve raised this with Royal Mail so many times,” Ward said. When executives offered what he called “less than honest excuses,” they were talking into a vacuum. Meanwhile, postal workers were explaining the situation directly to customers on their rounds. “It’s bizarre,” he said.
He traced this to what he described as a managerial ethos that had hardened over the years—shrinking the traditional service and recasting it as a leaner, more transactional carrier.
The shift that mattered most to him was the reshaping of terms and conditions. Moving towards what he called an exploitative employment model. “They see that as the future,” he said flatly.
What we are witnessing, he argued, was not a temporary crisis but “a battle for the heart and soul of the future of this company.”
Two directions lay ahead. One seemed to be managed decline—asset-light, labour-light, stripped back.
The other, he insisted, recognised Royal Mail’s extraordinary advantages.
First: infrastructure. The network connected every single household in the UK, however remote. Every business, too.
“That infrastructure isn’t a burden,” he said. In his telling, it was the company’s greatest asset—the foundation of a different and very exciting future.
“If it were in different hands, they’d be doing all sorts of things with it.” They would leverage it, drive different services through it. Instead, he argued, the current leadership had adopted a narrow view: grow parcels. “We support the need to grow Royal Mail,” he added. “But we don’t see it as the only part of the future.”
The CWU accepted the digital shift and pressures on traditional services. What irritated Ward was the framing—as though adaptation must mean contraction.
“If they really want to expand, address these challenges… they need people who can see the advantages.” Not just of infrastructure, but of postal workers themselves—their knowledge of communities, their presence on every street.
He circled back to the letter—the two-week deadline. Parliament had “had enough.”
When I asked whether Ward had been offered the same opportunity to respond, he said no. “We’ll mobilise our members now.”
More postal workers would write directly to MPs, answering the Committee’s questions from the shop floor.
“It’s a very helpful development,” he admitted. Helpful because it forced clarity.
Yet he remained sceptical. “What they don’t want to be caught on,” he said, “is that they haven’t got a vision for the future.” Instead, he repeated, they were turning Royal Mail into another parcel carrier. “And we’re going to call that out.”
The debate would not be confined to boardroom language. If the company narrowed it, they would widen it—to government, to Ofcom, to the country itself.
He insisted again they did not want to damage the company. This was not an attack, but a contest over direction—alignment around a vision already set out in an agreement signed by EP Group CEO Daniel Kretinsky.
“There are big stakes here,” Ward reminded me.
He framed the disagreement as philosophical. Strong institutions, he suggested, are allowed to drift and then are diminished.
He rejected the idea he was trying to preserve the past. Communications had changed. Letter volumes had declined. “What they’re trying to present,” he said, “is that they’re the modernisers—and we’re holding them back.”
The union, he said, was democratic in structure and close to operational reality. Representatives cared about the company—and about the people.
“We’re under no illusion,” he said. The market had changed. So must the business.
But on one side, he argued, was a narrower model—less public-service network, more commodity carrier. On the other was restructuring built on infrastructure, workforce knowledge and reform of the service specification.
He accused the company of paying bonuses despite deteriorating performance. Of promising standards not met. At one point, he said they were “ripping customers off.”
Yet he conceded reform was necessary. Adjusting obligations to reflect the shift from letters to parcels could create a window of three or four years to develop new services.
The disagreement was not over reform, but over what accompanied it.
He pointed to the earlier agreement signed with Kretinsky and endorsed by government as the foundation for a different direction. “They haven’t delivered on that agreement,” he said.
The government, having cleared the takeover, insisted on financial protections, stability safeguards, and commitments to workers and investment.
It was meant to build a future.
Yet, Ward said, senior managers had “never written a single communication” internally about the agreement.
“They’re trying to sabotage it because they didn’t support it when it came in.”
That brought him to the second development: a private meeting just had with Kretinsky and his deputy, plus Ward and his, Martin Walsh.
Ward suggested EP Group had expected a contained discussion. Instead, the government seized the moment. The government proposed a four-week period of intensive, monitored talks to resolve outstanding issues around the agreement.
Four weeks. Structured engagement.
That included reform and equalising new entrants’ terms and conditions. They had agreed to end the lower tier. Now they said they could not afford it.
“We can’t accept that Kretinsky didn’t know,” Ward said. “What’s changed?”
Secretary of State Peter Kyle asked for daily reports. A senior adviser would monitor progress. In short, an agreement was expected.
“These two things happened on the same day,” Ward noted—the Committee letter and the meeting.
“There needed to be a degree of honesty.”
He spoke about regulation, structural imbalance, and the universal burden Royal Mail carries.
“If people want the service to continue, there has to be some kind of support.”
That could mean government backing, sector-wide bargaining, structural levelling.
“There’s got to be a level playing field.”
Morale, he said, was collapsing. Workers cared about delivery and relationships on routes.
“A job like this is more than just delivering.”
MPs were not hearing anger at posties, he added, but at service failure.
“They’re not the modernisers. They have no vision.”
His alternative vision was broader: coexistence between digital and physical infrastructure. Supporting small businesses regionally. Leveraging physical presence in a digital economy.
The four-week talks were tactical. What the CWU wanted was public reaffirmation of the agreement, clear implementation timelines, resolution of reform issues, equalisation of terms — and a symbolic act: management telling their own managers they support the agreement.
“They have never written to their own managers.”
Without that internal shift, he believed, everything else was theatre.
“You cannot grow,” he said with emphasis, “if you can’t deliver your basic service.”
Facilitation meant monitoring, pressure, daily reporting. The state might not sit at the table—but it was now watching the clock.
And beneath it all was something more human. The postie who knows the route. Who feels the service slipping.
“They care about the service,” said Ward.
Peter Bach lives in London.