ROSS CLARK: The Royal Mail’s demise is an affront to British individuals

How arduous it’s to think about the wonderful and environment friendly postal service that, in 1936, impressed W. H. Auden to put in writing his poem Night Mail.

It was composed to accompany a brief movie documentary on the ‘Travelling Post Office’ — on which hundreds of letters had been sorted by hand throughout its nightly journey by rail from London to Scotland.

The poem romantically captured the supply of the whole lot from ‘letters of thanks, letters from banks, letters of joy from girl and boy’, to ‘timid lovers’ declarations, and gossip, gossip from all of the nations’.

Were Auden writing in the present day, his verse would describe a grim litany of missed hospital appointments, unpaid payments, myriad delays and an terrible but ruinously costly service. Last yr, Gordon Chalmers, a former postman on the Isle of Mull, stated he missed an pressing most cancers referral as a result of he had acquired no put up for per week.

Shame

At the time, there have been reported to be 50 ‘cages’ of mail sitting in close by Oban ready to be delivered.

And sadly, this abysmal service could possibly be about to get even worse. To its disgrace, the Royal Mail is making an attempt to wriggle out of a ‘minimum service’ deal it struck only a few years in the past.

The sorry saga began again in 2013 when the Royal Mail was privatised — ending nearly 5 centuries of being run by the State following its basis in 1516 by Henry VIII. Under its so-called ‘Universal Service Obligation’, the brand new ‘company’ made a transparent promise: to proceed delivering letters to each tackle within the United Kingdom, six days per week.

In return, the Royal Mail was given a charmed deal no different privatised firm had been granted earlier than, and which ought to have represented a flying begin: it was relieved of £40 billion value of historic pension liabilities, which remained with the taxpayer.

Moreover, it was allowed to hold on to priceless property — and has since made a killing from promoting, for instance, a lot of the web site of the Mount Pleasant Sorting Office in North London to be redeveloped as posh flats.

You and I, then, continued to cough up for Postman Pat’s pension, at the same time as the price of utilizing his providers soared: since 2011, the value of a first-class stamp has leapt from 46p to a whopping £1.25 in the present day because the variety of letters being despatched has plummeted.

It’s now manifestly clear the giveaway privatisation has ripped us all off. And to make issues worse, Ofcom — the regulator that oversees put up deliveries — seems to be taking Royal Mail’s facet.

In a brand new Ofcom report, it units out numerous shoddy choices to be ‘consulted upon’ — all of which might short-change the general public.

Under one Ofcom possibility, Saturday deliveries could possibly be cancelled altogether, saving the Royal Mail as much as £200 million a yr. Under another plan, deliveries could possibly be lowered to only three days per week, saving the corporate as much as £650 million a yr.

A 3rd, particularly lamentable possibility can be to make sure solely ‘the majority of letters’ are delivered inside three days — successfully abolishing first-class put up and telling us all to decrease our expectations.

That might additionally save them as much as £650 million per yr.

Another large saving from these wheezes, by the way, can be avoiding Ofcom fines. Last yr the regulator fined Royal Mail £5.6 million for its pathetic efficiency in assembly targets.

To permit the Royal Mail to betray the phrases of its settlement on such a rare scale can be nothing lower than an affront to the British individuals. Whether or not we nonetheless put up common letters to family and friends, all of us nonetheless depend on the postal service — not the web — for essential written communications such because the supply of financial institution playing cards and invoice reminders.

I scarcely thought Royal Mail might sink any decrease, nevertheless it has managed to reside all the way down to expectations. Already, it delivers lower than three quarters (73.7 per cent) of first-class letters, and 90.7 per cent of second-class ones, on time (its targets are 93 per cent and 98.5 per cent respectively).

In the Outer Hebrides, simply 30 per cent of first-class letters arrive on time.

Excusable, maybe, on condition that storms generally imply the islands are reduce off from the mainland, and the ruling SNP’s failure to provide new vessels for important ferry routes has made journey tougher.

But why does Enfield in North London formally endure the worst postal service in England, with simply 65 per cent of first-class letters arriving the next day? Residents need to ship birthday playing cards two weeks upfront, so poor is the service. To the south in Bromley, determined residents have taken to driving to the sorting workplace with a view to choose up their put up.

Lucrative

In a number of rural areas, proof suggests put up was delivered simply as soon as a fortnight at factors final yr. An undercover investigation discovered workers at sorting workplaces had been tossing first-class letters apart to prioritise extra profitable parcels.

So this new report, which might see a historic British establishment additional devalued (and unhealthy service additional entrenched) is unsurprising.

Ofcom, nevertheless, claims reforms are inevitable. The variety of letters despatched via the put up has halved since 2011 — from 14.3 billion to 7.3 billion — and will fall to only 4 billion inside 5 years.

But if Royal Mail had been higher run, it might have seized on possibilities provided within the parcels enterprise: tens of millions extra are being shipped amid the rise in on-line buying. Instead, the corporate misplaced £750 million within the yr to final March, permitting Amazon and personal courier companies reminiscent of Evri and DPD to steal its lunch. So why has it failed on such an enormous scale?

To me, the reply is evident. You can take the corporate out of the general public sector, however it’s a lot tougher to take the general public sector out of the corporate.

Royal Mail retains the poor administration and toxic industrial relations from its time as a state-run organisation. It has lengthy since deserted the travelling put up workplaces W.H. Auden wrote about, which allowed put up to be sorted by actual individuals on a shifting prepare.

Strikes

Nowadays, it’s sorted mechanically by machines and carted around the nation by lorry. The firm just lately boasted of investing in 39 new automated parcel sorting machines.

At the identical time the variety of Royal Mail staff in letter and parcel supply has gone up previously decade, from 150,000 to 157,000. What do all these additional staff do if there’s much less mail to ship and extra labour-saving equipment?

And just like the privatised railway trade, it stays crippled by frequent strikes. Unite and the Communication Workers’ Union, representing Royal Mail staff, continued with strikes for 14 months between May 2022 and July 2023, demanding greater pay despite understanding the corporate was dropping cash, and job cuts can be inevitable in the event that they bid up pay. Even Arthur Scargill deserted his 1984 miners’ strike after 11 months.

Eventually, staff agreed a three-year pay deal, with a ten per cent wage enhance and a one-off lump sum of £500.

Vince Cable, the Lib Dem enterprise secretary who oversaw Royal Mail’s privatisation within the coalition years, stated in the course of the monetary disaster: ‘We cannot have a situation where the banks are able to privatise their profits and nationalise their losses.’

Yet that is exactly what he did in his botched privatisation — and now all of us are struggling the outcomes.