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Britain’s postal service could consider reducing deliveries to five days a week, or even three, from six, the country’s regulator said on Wednesday, provoking resistance from lawmakers and businesses.
The Royal Mail, like the United States Postal Service, has been increasingly affected by service problems and financial pressures. Given rising costs, the organization risks becoming “financially and operationally unsustainable in the long term.” According to a report by Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator..
Reducing delivery to just three days a week would save Royal Mail up to £650 million ($830 million) a year, according to the report. Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Belgium have reduced delivery frequency or extended letter delivery times in recent years, Ofcom said.
Lawmakers, however, rejected the idea. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose Conservatives have a majority, said on Wednesday he remained “absolutely committed” to ensuring Royal Mail delivers six days a week. The service, which was privatized in 2013, is required by law to deliver mail six days a week, so any change would require a vote in Parliament.
Richard Thomson, Scottish National Party Member of Parliament, said he opposed reducing Royal Mail delivery days because many people, especially those in rural areas, relied on the postal service to transport documents and deliver parcels in a reliable and economical.
“What is proposed would eat away at the very core of that assumption,” Thomson said. He added that privatization had left Royal Mail on the path to putting the bottom line before customer service.
The volume of letters in Britain has halved since 2011, with more people sending emails and text messages instead of handwritten notes. But the post office is still part of the fabric of British life. Its history dates back more than 500 years, when Henry VIII commissioned his secretary to establish a national postal network to transport his mail and that of the Tudor court. Carlos I opened the postal service to the public in 1635.
Other services in Great Britain They also face tight budgets. Persistent Cuts to the National Health Service, a symbol of the British welfare state, have left the service underfunded and understaffed. After more than a decade of low economic growth and wage stagnation, three-quarters of Britons said they believed the country was becoming a worse place to live, up from 49 percent of people in 2011 who said the Things were getting worse, according to a study. Ipsos survey.
Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, which represents postal workers, said in a statement on Wednesday that reducing delivery to just three days a week would destroy Royal Mail as customers know it and affect thousands of Job positions. The proposal was “dead in the water,” he said.
Tina McKenzie, policy chair of the Federation of Small Businesses, which represents small businesses and self-employed people, said a quarter of small businesses relied on the postal service and that cutting services would disrupt the economy.
Ofcom, the regulator, said it would reduce the number of delivery days without lowering delivery targets, but did not provide details on how this would work. Under the new guidelines, a next-day service for urgent letters would still be available.
Royal Mail, which posted an operating loss of £419 million ($533 million) last year on an adjusted basis, said it expected to deliver four billion letters annually over five years, up from 20 billion letters. almost two decades ago.
Nick Read, chief executive of the Post Office, a separate organization from Royal Mail, said in a statement on Wednesday that he agreed there should be a debate about how to modernize the postal service. Still, vulnerable people, seniors and businesses rely on a reliable mailing service, he said, and “their needs must be considered in any review.”
In a survey for Ofcom, 79 per cent of people said some things should always be sent by post. Saturday deliveries were important to 58 per cent of people, up from 63 per cent in 2020, according to the survey of more than 2,000 British adults in October and November. (The US Postal Service delivers only Priority Mail and Amazon packages on Sundays.)
Britain’s Post Office has also been in the spotlight in recent weeks over a year-long scandal in which hundreds of people who ran Post Office branches were wrongfully accused of theft. An ITV series, “Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office,” which began airing Jan. 1, dramatized the fate of postal workers who were pursued in court between 1999 and 2015 for financial losses that never occurred.
