A spotlight needs to be shone on the failings of Royal Mail and political pressure applied on its owners to improve its service.
There are many people who are being left cut off from the outside world as a result of Royal Mail’s poor performance. People who are still reliant on mail as their primary form of contact with people and institutions.
Quite often it is older people who are reliant on letters arriving in a timely manner, many of them important correspondences such as medical appointments and banking arrangements.
Earlier this month, the Business and Trade Committee (BTC) said Royal Mail’s claim of delivering 92.1 per cent of letters on time obscures the fact that only 74.9 per cent of First Class mail was delivered on time so far this year, against a target of 93 per cent. That translates into approximately 126 million First Class letters arriving late over the year, 219 million in total if the nearly 10 per cent of Second Class letters set to arrive late are included.
No wonder the chair of the BTC has described Royal Mail as a “national institution in meltdown”.
How information is disseminated is changing but there are still people who are reliant on letters and it is Royal Mail’s job to ensure that service levels are maintained.
When Royal Mail’s new owner Daniel Křetínský appears in Parliament today, he must be challenged as to how it will fulfil its obligation to customers and deliver the level of service that is expected of the institution because customers are exasperated with what is being, or rather not being, delivered currently.