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Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the performance of Royal Mail.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I thank all the hon. and right hon. Members who have turned out today. In truth, any one of them could introduce this debate: we face the same issues, no matter where we are in the United Kingdom.
I want to start by recognising the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee and its Chair, the right hon. Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne). In May, the Committee concluded that the Royal Mail service was unacceptable and that Ofcom’s approach had failed to secure the improvement needed. It has kept up the pressure. Its Chair wrote to Ofcom again just yesterday, and I will draw on that letter. At Prime Minister’s questions today, the Prime Minister acknowledged the systemic and continued failings of Royal Mail.
In Lagan Valley, the post does not arrive reliably; it comes in batches. People tell me that they get no mail for two or three weeks, and then a whole month’s-worth arrives at once. A letter sent across Lisburn can take over a week to arrive. People tell me that there is no difference between first and second class any more; it just arrives when it arrives. I know that second-class mail can now be delivered every other day. That is fine, but it is still supposed to arrive within three working days. Waiting weeks is not an alternate-day service.
This is causing real harm. Northern Ireland has by far the worst health waiting lists in the UK. Because of postal delays, my constituents are missing MRI and CT scans. The mother of one of my constituents was taken off an orthopaedic waiting list because she never got the letter. These people are already waiting in pain, and when a letter fails to show up, the system blames them, and every missed appointment lengthens the queue for everybody.
This happens elsewhere, too. A constituent got her jury summons after the deadline passed, and she spent days terrified that she would be fined for something that was not her fault. Driving licences, benefit cheques, bank cards and insurance documents just go missing. People pay extra for special delivery but items still sit for days, marked “in office”. Important legal documents go missing or show up opened.
Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)
The hon. Member is giving a great speech. One of my constituents has not received post for an entire month, despite expecting time-sensitive correspondence relating to the death of her partner, who sadly passed away earlier this year. That is totally unacceptable. Does the hon. Member agree that Ofcom needs to be pushing Royal Mail to speed up improvements to regulated delivery? Our residents have waited long enough.
Sorcha Eastwood
I absolutely do. That is an extremely distressing and poignant example. In Northern Ireland, confidential mail matters. Local groups supporting vulnerable people tell me that they are deeply concerned about letters ending up at the wrong address. A letter in the wrong hands in Northern Ireland can put people in real danger.
Businesses are hurting too. In my constituency of Lagan Valley, we have a fantastic local business called the Pie Shop—it sells pies. It recently had a chance to bid for a contract that would see its products stocked in Harrods and whose commercial value it would be virtually impossible to estimate. But due to the Royal Mail delays, it missed the deadline to participate in the trial and it lost that—a huge blow to that small business. That will be replicated right across the UK.
The real-life impacts of this failing service have been mentioned. A woman recently wrote to me and said that a handwritten card marking the anniversary of her mother’s death took nine days to arrive. For her, that was not minor; it was another blow on a day that was already hard. A sympathy letter, a birthday note or a Christmas card: these are careful, deliberate actions that we make to say, “I care about you. You matter. I love you. You aren’t alone.” When the post fails, that is what goes missing.
Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)
I thank the hon. Member for securing this important debate. I held a similar one earlier this year on 4 February, in which I raised issues regarding Royal Mail, particularly with respect to the WV15 and WV16 postcodes in my constituency, where people are waiting for two, three and sometimes four weeks to receive mail. Does she agree that that situation is completely unacceptable and must change, because my constituents, like many other people, feel that they really do not matter to Royal Mail?
Sorcha Eastwood
Indeed. I thank the hon. Member for his work on this subject to date—it is very much valued and appreciated by all of us in this House—and I think that he has just illustrated the point perfectly.
We have had the discussion and the debate around which items matter in terms of Royal Mail’s service. Parcels still manage to turn up on time and online orders arrive straight away, while letters sit in sorting offices. Everyone can see what Royal Mail is prioritising.
Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for giving way and for making such a powerful testimony about the impact of letters being lost or delayed by Royal Mail. I have been flagging up issues in the BH11, BH10 and BH9 postcodes, which are in my constituency, just as many other hon. Members here today have been flagging up issues about the postcodes in their constituencies. What concerns me most is that the Royal Mail responses to the issues we raise are at best generic and at worst deceptive. Does she agree that that is totally unacceptable and that Royal Mail needs to do better?
Sorcha Eastwood
I think the hon. Lady has perfectly anticipated the next paragraph of my speech. She is absolutely right that such responses make an already bad situation even worse. If we knew that our business or organisation was already under fire—for the life of me, I cannot understand why Royal Mail simply has not sought to improve how it responds to complaints.
Indeed, some of my constituents have told me what happens whenever they try to complain. The online complaints form has gone. As already suggested by the hon. Lady, the phoneline is a generic national number and it can take up to an hour to get through. If someone does get through, they are given a complaint number and promised a reply within three days, but weeks later they are still waiting for an answer. They use the email address provided, diligently setting out the issue once more, and eventually get a reply saying that the address is no longer monitored. A complaints system that tells you nobody is listening is not a complaints system.
John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Lady for making such an excellent speech. Regarding the way that Royal Mail deals with complaints via email and via its website, does she agree that we as Members of the House of Commons seem to be doing a better job of identifying the problems than Royal Mail itself? Thanks to the excellent work of my brilliant team, there is a page on my website where people can plot where they live and the type of problem they have been having, which strikes me as something that Royal Mail ought to be doing itself—perhaps we should encourage it to do so.
Sorcha Eastwood
The hon. Member makes an excellent suggestion, and he is quite right that it should not be on Members of this House to conduct such an extensive and ongoing campaign, almost fielding the complaints, as it were. I thank him for his leadership on that.
Speaking of leadership, I now turn to the leadership of Royal Mail. I want to be fair to Royal Mail—it deserves a right of reply—but I cannot say what its leadership thinks, because its leaders will not meet me. I wonder why.
Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)
Following a meeting that I held with other Labour MPs and the head of Ofcom this week, the CEO of Royal Mail has invited a number of us to meet him off-site at 9.30 am on a random Wednesday in a couple of weeks’ time. Does the hon. Lady agree that it would be much better for him to recognise that MPs from across the House and representing every single type of constituency have major concerns about Royal Mail, and that he needs to get himself into Parliament to listen to our questions directly, rather than suggesting that we traipse halfway across London to go into a room that he is in charge of on the basis of an agenda that is entirely his, rather than the one that our constituents want to discuss?
Sorcha Eastwood
Hear, hear—I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. In all honesty, I was reluctant today to say that Royal Mail was continuing not to engage with me; I felt that it was gaslighting and I was scared to mention that. It did manage to meet some of my colleagues in Northern Ireland at a local level, which I thought was generous. However, this matter is a reserved matter, it does sit within this House, and I think that right hon. and hon. Members, including Front Benchers, have gone an awfully long way to accommodate Royal Mail when, as the hon. Member has just said, its representatives should be presenting themselves in this House, not the other way around.
I want to turn now to the posties. I declare an interest: my stepdad was a postman many years ago in Sheffield, and he has permanent back problems as a result. I think many people underestimate just how difficult a job that was, at any time. But now? I dread to think about the stress and pressure that those posties are under.
Tahir Ali (Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley) (Lab)
Before joining Parliament in 2019, I had 22 years of service with Royal Mail as an engineer, and I can tell the hon. Lady that working conditions were in decline then. We now hear that more than 400 postal workers are leaving the business every week. That is due to workload and working conditions. A two-tier workforce cannot work for any organisation; the workforce need to be rewarded accordingly. Does the hon. Lady agree?
Sorcha Eastwood
I absolutely agree with the hon. Member. I really feel that he has hit upon the crux of the matter here. We are being told that Royal Mail has identified issues that it is now trying to rectify through recruitment and so on, but if people already know that the workers holding up this once-great British institution are being treated in the way that they are, that will not be an advertisement for anybody to work for that organisation. That troubles me.
Our postal workers are not the problem. Our posties are doing their absolute best to hold things together but, as has just been highlighted, they are leaving in their droves.
Sir Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
On the issue of postwomen and postmen, in areas such as mine, the most rural areas of our country, those people are a lifeline. They are often the only people whom older people meet in a day, but a postman in my constituency has been taken to an employment tribunal because he helped to deliver a local parish magazine in the middle of nowhere —just to be a help. Those are sometimes the only people my constituents meet, so as the hon. Lady campaigns on this issue, will she press for recognition of the social role that postwomen and postmen play throughout the country, on behalf of many of our constituents?
Sorcha Eastwood
Absolutely. My constituency is actually still classed as a rural constituency, so I think that the right hon. Member’s point is really well made. We have already discussed the delays in the actual letters arriving, but in this day and age, when so many people are isolated, sending an old-fashioned letter is in itself almost an act of rebellion against such an impersonal society. Indeed, for some people right across the UK, in every constituency, their postie will be their only point of contact. It would be an absolute shame if we lost sight of that in all of this.
Postal workers are seriously worried. Some of my own constituents who work for Royal Mail tell me that management simply are not listening. Experienced staff are gone, and new workers are brought in on worse terms, as we have already heard. Workers have ideas to fix that, but they are being shut out and treated as if they are part of the problem.
Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)
The hon. Lady is giving a typically powerful and empathetic speech. Amid the deluge of letters failing to arrive in my constituency, one constituent was waiting 12 days for an important letter. They went to the sorting office and were told that it had not been delivered, along with another pile of mail, because the postie was on leave. That kind of management at the local level, never mind among the leadership of the organisation, shows me that there is not adequate support behind our postal workers. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need a reset in the culture, so that there is not this division between postal workers, many of whom have great ideas to improve the quality of service, and management, who seem to be pressing new reforms down on them without a real understanding of the challenges of the role?
Sorcha Eastwood
Absolutely; again, the hon. Member has got to the real nub of the issue. It almost feels as though it is handy and convenient for Royal Mail to pit worker against worker and person against person. By doing so, I think it is seeking to evade its responsibility and role in all of this, and we must not lose sight of that.
Royal Mail is rolling out a new delivery model by Christmas, apparently, which the Communication Workers Union reports is causing huge problems in hundreds of offices right across the country. Is it not better to fix what is broken before making it bigger? Why roll it out right before the busiest time of the year?
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. I recently visited a delivery office in Bradford that serves my Shipley constituents, to understand how the new delivery model will work. The management reassured me that it would solve much of the litany of complaints about the late and infrequent deliveries experienced by my constituents, along with those represented by many of the Members present. Does the hon. Lady agree that, if the new delivery model does not lead to more reliable postal services, we need to look at other options, including the renationalisation of Royal Mail?
Sorcha Eastwood
I absolutely agree. I may be pre-empting the conclusion of my remarks, but I think that is something we all now have to consider.
Royal Mail is more than simply a postal service. It is the red pillar box and the wee red van going up and down country lanes to our small family farm. It is more than just a letter.
Helen Grant (Maidstone and Malling) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing us a really important debate. This issue is clearly affecting us all, and Royal Mail is certainly also badly failing constituents in my Kent constituency. I feel the affection for our posties, which she touched on when she spoke about the red post boxes and so on; Royal Mail should be a national treasure, but it is not. My concern is that the situation is getting worse, not better. Royal Mail has been fined £37 million for poor performance in recent years, and there is an Ofcom investigation. Many of us feel that Royal Mail is not fit for purpose and that no change is happening, so does she agree that the Government need to do more by taking enforcement action and putting some more pressure on the leadership?
Sorcha Eastwood
I wholeheartedly agree. Royal Mail says quality is improving, believe it or not. To be fair, recent quarterly figures showed a slight pick-up, but it has not met its annual delivery targets in six years. My constituents do not read quarterly reports; they rely on social media to see whether the postie is coming. It is a completely unacceptable situation. We also hear that stamp prices keep going up. Citizens Advice suggested capping stamp prices if delivery targets are not met. It is a simple rule: if you don’t deliver the service, you can’t raise your prices. Will the Government back that plan?
Who is supposed to fix this issue? Ofcom, as we have heard, has fined Royal Mail more than £37 million in three years. If fines changed behaviour, things would be fixed by now. Even Ofcom says that
“persistent failure…may raise…fundamental questions about the long-term provision of the universal service”.
I agree. We are at that point. As the BIST Committee Chair, the right hon. Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North, put it, the current position
“leaves unanswered who will take responsibility for identifying and closing the gaps in postal regulation”.
Ofcom points to the Government, the Government point at Ofcom and the post sits in the delivery office. The BIST Committee gave Royal Mail and Ofcom until 22 November to show real improvement. If they do not, the Secretary of State should consult on changing Ofcom’s powers.
Sorcha Eastwood
That is a real question that we must seriously investigate. I am sure that other right hon. and hon. Members across the House would attest to wanting further robust mechanisms to challenge many of Ofcom’s other remits successfully. I wonder whether the Minister will commit today to consult on changing Ofcom’s powers.
Finally, I turn to the bigger picture. As we have heard from right hon. and hon. Members in the debate, this issue is about much more than just simply Royal Mail and letters. For the first time in its 500-year history, Royal Mail is owned by an overseas company—the highly profitable EP Group. The Government approved the takeover, but serious questions remain about our sovereignty. Royal Mail is a British institution. It delivers to every address in the UK for the same price, whether to a farm in Northern Ireland, a flat in Cardiff or a college in Scotland. It is as much critical infrastructure as any road or cable. When it was privatised in 2013, we were promised better service and investment. Instead, we have had six years of missed targets. A company unanswerable to its owners will always be tempted to favour its most profitable work. The universal service obligation is meant to guard against that.
Fines have not been enough. Other countries subsidise their postal providers or bring them into public ownership, as Ofcom notes. I go further here than the Committee has, but I believe it is time to review Royal Mail’s ownership and governance, so that the universal service obligation is protected in the public interest.
I ask the House: who do we want to be as a society? Do we want to be a country that can no longer promise that a card will reach a grieving daughter, or a hospital letter will reach a patient? Or do we want to be a country that treats the post as what it has always been—a promise to every address— and protects it?
As I said earlier, this is about more than just letters. What are we as a country, if we can no longer rely upon a service that is nearly as old as time itself? Given current geopolitical instability, it would also be remiss of me not to put on the record the grave concerns that I have about critical national infrastructure being owned overseas, rather than in our own country.
For my final requests, I am asking the Government for four things. First, will the Government consult on changing Ofcom’s powers, if service has not improved by the Committee’s 22 November deadline? Secondly, will the Government consider linking stamp prices to delivery performance, as Citizens Advice has proposed? Thirdly, what guarantees do we have for Christmas deliveries this year? Fourthly, and finally, will the Government review Royal Mail’s ownership model, to protect the universal service for the long term?
The public hold up their end of the bargain: they buy the stamps, post letters in time and wait. The system is letting them down. My constituents want to trust the post again. The Government, Ofcom and Royal Mail all have the power to put that right, and this Christmas is the time to show it.
Emma Lewell (in the Chair)
With a time limit of three and a half minutes, I call Anneliese Dodds.
Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a real pleasure to speak in this debate. I am very grateful, above all, to the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this debate.
This is not the first debate that we have had on this subject, even in this Chamber. Some of us have spoken on this matter many times. In fact, very sadly, it feels like some of the rest of the country is now catching up with some of the issues that we have had in Oxford East over many years. As the hon. Member for Lagan Valley mentioned, those issues have been highlighted by the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee. They were also indicated by the meeting that a number of us had recently with Ofcom and the CWU, organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson).
In my area, the root of the challenge relates to recruitment and retention—I very much agree with comments that have been made—and over time there has been increased transparency. After a certain amount of denial that there was a problem, there is now better communication, at least with my regional Royal Mail, and sometimes with national Royal Mail as well.
However, there is a huge challenge. I am concerned to hear that the model that was developed in Oxford for the prioritisation of NHS mail does not seem to be operating everywhere; perhaps the Minister can look into that. That model was devised by Oxford posties to pull out that NHS mail. Again, the approaches to mail prioritisation and rotation that are sadly having to be used in Oxford because of the number of absences, and failures in recruitment and retention, do not seem to be being used everywhere.
Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)
The right hon. Lady makes a really important point. Royal Mail recently wrote to me after I complained about the lack of service in Selsey, a coastal area where there seems to be absolutely no mail being delivered. It said that it prioritised medical letters and had a rotation system, yet that is not evidenced on the ground in Selsey. People are being asked to collect their own mail from the sorting office, which is only open for two hours a day. Does she agree that Royal Mail needs to turn its words to MPs into actions, so that our residents can see the changes we are asking for?
Anneliese Dodds
I certainly agree. Many of us have been very frustrated that we often get stock letters back about the problems being experienced, that our constituents have to go to sorting offices and that we are not seeing the change we urgently need. Given the challenges with recruitment and retention, I have been trying to promote vacancies myself as a local MP.
Three things need to happen. First, we need the national management to listen to the local posties and the CWU, because they have ideas about how to deal with this. Secondly, we need to get a grip on the unlevel playing field, especially when it comes to parcels. We all know that the volume of letters is going down, not just in the UK, but right across Europe and other industrialised countries. The parcel trade is therefore really important, but we have a farcical situation where 98% of Royal Mail workers are employees on permanent contracts, yet they do effectively exactly the same job as people who are not employed—people who are under terrible terms and conditions and are treated as if they are self-employed. We all know that is bogus. That needs to be dealt with, because it is leading to an unlevel playing field. Given the Minister’s great experience of working rights legislation, will she ensure that the consultation on bogus self-employment going on at the moment leads to the change that is needed?
Finally, I urge the Minister and the Government to focus on the potential of Royal Mail. We are talking about the challenges and representing our constituents’ concerns now, but we have an amazing network in the UK, from the most northerly to the most southerly point. It proved its worth during covid. We should be doing everything we can to recognise and build on that potential. I ask them to please listen to the CWU’s proposals on that in particular.
Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this fantastic debate on an important issue, on which she spoke so well. I also thank her for shouting out the work of the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee, of which I am a member, and of our Chair; let us see what November brings on that question.
The turnover rate of new Royal Mail employees is extremely high, and the work practices are incredibly harsh and getting harsher. We rely so much on our local posties to serve and help us, and it is really depressing to see how they are treated. My local postie, Tony, has just taken redundancy after years and years of work. It is hard not to feel that he was pushed out by being given a new round. It eminently did not suit, and Royal Mail knew that. That is happening in Witney and in other areas up and down the country. It is harsh and cruel. The numbers of people losing their jobs every week are not by accident, but by design.
Our Select Committee’s investigation into Royal Mail’s letter delivery service noted that only 74.9% of first-class mail has been delivered on time so far this year, against a target of 93%. That translates into approximately 126 million first-class letters arriving late over the year. At present, missing targets is cheaper than meeting them. Fines totalled about £37 million over the last three years, while first class reached only 75.7% next-day delivery, against a 93% target. That is a real problem. If Royal Mail just takes the fines, that does not help anybody.
The way to fix that problem is by focusing on two things that the owner values most: stamp price rises and taking cash out of the Royal Mail business. Here are some ideas on how we could achieve that. First, as others have mentioned, there should be no stamp price rises until targets are met. We have to get that link absolutely firm. That hits revenue directly and will make them pay attention. Secondly, Royal Mail’s cash should be ringfenced: no dividends, inter-group loans or management fees to the parent company while targets are missed, as Ofwat can do with water companies. That would stop letters subsidising parcels.
Thirdly, fines should be escalated, linked to turnover and paid into service improvement when we receive them. Fourthly, there should be automatic compensation for customers when mail is late, as there is with delay and repay. Fifthly, there should be no executive bonuses—none—while targets are missed. Sixthly, we need transparency: performance by postcode area, letters and parcels shown separately, and staffing levels published. That is absolutely critical. They hide behind this fug about how they lack the data. We need it at a granular level so that we can see what is going on where. Finally, there should be—
Chris Ward (Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this debate. I want first to put on the record my appreciation for Royal Mail staff, particularly those I met on Monday at the delivery office in Rottingdean in my constituency, where I saw how hard they are working to improve the local service.
Of course, we all want Royal Mail to succeed, because it is a universal postal service and something we all rely on. It is a truly national service and a source of good, unionised jobs. We should celebrate that more—frankly, we should do more to encourage other providers in the sector to match those employment standards and expectations. But we also have to ask how we can better support Royal Mail staff to do the job we all need them to do, and how our constituents can be sure that they will receive the service they rely on, because right now problems with Royal Mail is the one issue I get the most emails about—I was going to say letters, but it is actually emails.
I will give two quick examples. One constituent from Woodingdean in my constituency told me that they had no deliveries from 1 to 16 August this year, 29 pieces of mail on 17 August, no deliveries from 18 to 28 August, and 13 items of mail delivered on 29 August. When I raised this directly with Royal Mail locally, I was told:
“there are no current issues with the delivery of mail to your constituent’s address…deliveries are taking place six days a week”.
Frankly, it is hard to know how to relay that to constituents.
James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)
A constituent in West Bridgford in my constituency showed me a letter they had received from TV Times, telling them that because Royal Mail had become so unreliable it was going to use a third party to deliver the magazine separately, to make sure they got it on time. Does that not say everything about the reliability of Royal Mail?
Chris Ward
I am afraid it does. As my hon. Friend’s intervention shows, some constituents are now routinely missing letters—letters informing them of NHS appointments, legal affairs, fines and so on. One even contacted me on Saturday to say that he had only just received his Labour party conference pass, some four weeks late. Members might think that a blessing in disguise and that we should be praising Royal Mail, but he was not too pleased.
We are now in a cycle of despair with Royal Mail, where constituents report unacceptable delays all the time and MPs from across the House come here to raise them. Successive Governments will say how terrible it all is and demand that Ofcom acts and Royal Mail improves, but Ofcom does not have the powers it needs and keeps fining Royal Mail for failure, despite the fact that Royal Mail cannot make a profit anyway. Royal Mail has no chance of hitting its legally mandated targets and no hope of competing on a level playing field, because operators in the same sector simply do not have the same regulatory or employment standards that we ask of Royal Mail.
The result is rising anger on all sides, a loss of faith in our national delivery service and, frankly, a belief that we cannot even get the post to run on time in this country. I know that the Minister cares deeply about the issue and is working hard on it, so I urge her to break that cycle: look at what more we can do in Parliament to level the playing field for Royal Mail, empower the regulator more, and give Royal Mail staff the opportunity they need to improve and modernise the service. If we do that in this Parliament—there is a majority for it and cross-party support—then we can finally get our national postal service back on track and serving our constituents as it should be.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for setting the scene on a subject that is incredibly important to us all. As well as both being Northern Ireland MPs, we share a frustration with the Royal Mail.
I cannot do technology—that is just a fact of life, as I am very old-school—but I write letters regularly. Nothing impresses, helps or encourages a constituent as much as a hand-written letter sent to their house in a yellow envelope from the House of Commons. They appreciate that, which is why I do it. The business of the rest of my office is done by email.
Day after day, my office is inundated with phone calls and emails from people who go for weeks without seeing a postal delivery worker. Letters are piling up in sorting depots, with vital documents vanishing into a black hole. The public have completely lost faith in a service on which they have relied for generations.
I want to be entirely clear about where the blame lies. It does not lie with the hard-working, dedicated local postmen and postwomen who are working themselves to the bone. They work long hours and walk miles under immense pressure, bearing the brunt of public anger on the doorsteps. It is not their fault; they are being completely let down by senior management, a failed operating model and a chronic lack of investment.
Since I was a Member of the Legislative Assembly, I have always visited the Royal Mail depot in Newtownards at Christmas time. Staff retention is incredibly important. I met a guy just before Christmas who had worked for the Royal Mail for 20 years. I asked him how he was getting on, and he said, “Jim, I’m leaving next week.” I asked where he was going, and he was going up the road to Kiltonga, for better wages at Lakeland Dairies. Royal Mail has to address staff retention by ensuring the right pay.
When I speak to local staff in Strangford, they consistently tell me that they believe passionately in their public duty but that they are being asked to fight a losing battle with one hand tied behind their back. Without targeted funding to build or upgrade a dedicated sorting office in our area, our local posties will continue to drown under the backlog. Minister, what discussions have taken place with the owners of Royal Mail about its antiquated sorting centres and technology? What can be done to ensure that the guys who work there are able to see modern, suitable workplaces?
This is not just about missing birthday cards and delayed bank statements; it is about people not getting hospital appointments. My constituents are missing long-awaited cancer screenings, urgent surgical consultations and vital diagnostic scans. If they have been on a waiting list for six months, that could mean they wait for two years—it just does not work.
This is a timely point to discuss what is important. I have engaged with the former Northern Ireland Health Minister to ensure the use of barcoded envelopes for urgent medical mail, which has helped us in Northern Ireland, but it does not go the whole way. Royal Mail cannot keep cutting corners, reducing delivery days and abandoning its universal service obligation while senior executives line their pockets. We need accountability for a service that is currently failing the sick, the vulnerable and the elderly.
Richard Baker (Glenrothes and Mid Fife) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) on securing this vital debate and her excellent opening speech.
My office has been inundated with complaints from residents, particularly in Glenrothes, about unacceptable delays to Royal Mail deliveries. I therefore put out an appeal for information on social media, and in just a few days around 400 people replied to that one post with their experiences. Even after the revisions to the universal service obligation to reduce the frequency of second-class deliveries, seven in 10 of the people who contacted us said they were waiting a fortnight or more for their mail deliveries. Residents also reported post being delivered in bundles dating back weeks, as the hon. Lady said. That is simply not acceptable.
Anna Gelderd (South East Cornwall) (Lab)
I have also been running a local survey on this issue, and up to 80% of respondents in South East Cornwall report delays. As a rural and coastal area with a large number of elderly residents, this is a huge cause of concern. As the daughter of a postie, I know at first hand just how hard our frontline workers are working to make sure those elderly residents get what they deserve in a timely manner. What more can we do to make sure this problem is addressed?
Richard Baker
I could not agree more with those important points. They show that, from Cornwall right up to Scotland, the problems are the same and need to be addressed by Royal Mail. I will come to my proposals later in my speech.
We heard from people whose credit had been affected by a missed bill, people who missed jury citations and people who were penalised after car tax reminders never arrived. A number of Members have mentioned issues around health service appointments. Most worrying for me, 100 constituents received late NHS letters. Unacceptably, 45 missed an appointment or received a letter after the date. A constituent waited three years to get on to a consultant’s priority list, but she never received the letter and subsequently lost her place. A primary school-age child missed a vital appointed at Edinburgh sick kids hospital. A teenager was struck off the Victoria hospital’s dermatology department in Kirkcaldy for not turning up, although it was entirely outwith their control. Seventeen people managed to attend an appointment only because of a text or call reminder, as the letter was not received in time. Royal Mail has said to us that it has a priority barcode for NHS letters. I have checked with NHS Fife. It is using the code, and the letters are still not arriving on time, so Royal Mail must address the situation urgently.
It is obvious to all those who are aware of the situation that the new delivery system, which management said was going to make a big difference, is in fact failing, particularly for second-class mail. My constituents have been told at the counter that more lucrative parcels are being prioritised over letters.
It is striking that not a single constituent who has complained or got in contact with us put any blame on our overworked local posties. As many Members said, the situation is putting our postal staff under unacceptable pressure at work. Understaffing and longer routes mean that they are being asked to do the impossible. That drives up absence rates, which only makes the situation worse. According to the CWU, which has done so much work to campaign on this issue, Royal Mail is losing about 400 postal staff a week. I again urge the management to get around the table with the union and end the recruitment and retention crisis. So many of the problems that we face in the service today are caused by the recruitment and retention issues, so we must support our hard-working postal staff.
The situation in Glenrothes has improved marginally of late, but only on a short-term basis, because workers were brought in temporarily from Dundee. That is clearly not a sustainable solution, so a root-and-branch change is required, not quick fixes or plastering over the cracks. I urge Royal Mail to listen to the contributions from across the Chamber today and to the thousands of people across Glenrothes and Mid Fife who rely on this lifeline.
Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Ind)
Meur ras, Ms Lewell. It is an honour to serve under your chairship. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this debate and for her excellent speech.
The performance of Royal Mail in Camborne, Redruth and Hayle, in the south-west of Cornwall, has been simply woeful. Constituents regularly tell me that they have gone weeks without post and, like other hon. Members’ constituents, have received a large backlog all at once.
Sharon from Hayle had waited a year for an operation when she received a call from the hospital asking whether she intended to attend. The appointment letter, together with the swabs required pre surgery, had never arrived. Thankfully, the arrangements were later confirmed by phone and email, but the letter itself was delivered three days after the operation had taken place. Another constituent was sent a letter for a hospital appointment 19 days after it was scheduled. Such delays risk causing vulnerable people to miss essential treatment, and place a burden on our overstretched NHS.
In Cornwall, our remote coastal geography and patchy digital connectivity—to say the least—mean that many of us still rely heavily on the universal postal service, but I worry that the situation will only get worse. In recent weeks, several Royal Mail workers have contacted me with concerns about the new delivery model 26. They report unmanageable workloads, experienced workers leaving, morale at rock bottom and substantial volumes of mail sitting undelivered. Three workers completing four rounds does not sound a credible way to improve reliability and restore public trust in Royal Mail. I echo the points made: the issue is not one of posties; it is one of management. Nor should Royal Mail continue to respond, if at all, to our constituents with template responses or hide behind impossible-to-navigate AI chatbots, while the reality on the ground slips further behind.
I therefore ask the Minister what discussions the Government have had with Royal Mail about DM26, and what action will be taken to ensure my constituents receive a postal service worthy of the word “royal”. If Royal Mail is going to treat this House and elected Members with such arrogance, the Government must take direct, firm and urgent action.
Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) on securing this debate and on making such an excellent speech.
My constituents in Dartford welcome today’s debate. The performance of Royal Mail has been a running sore for many residents in Dartford and the surrounding towns and villages, and the growing delays are having a real-world impact on their lives. This is not about the hard work of staff at the Dartford delivery office. As we all know, Royal Mail has targets for local performance—in our case, it is for 87% of first-class mail to be delivered the next working day—that are palpably not being met. For the DA postcode that covers Dartford, the figure for 2025-26 was well below that at 74.6%. That is by no means the worst performance in the country but still a long way off hitting the target.
Given that we know that the performance of Royal Mail in Dartford, as in most of the country, is well below that expected, I want to share one notable example of the impact. I recently received an email from the manager of the North Kent community diagnostic centre on East Hill, who has seen a significant increase in the number of patients not attending appointments, with many saying they are not receiving their appointment letters, notwithstanding the priority supposedly given to NHS correspondence.
In one weekend earlier this month, almost half of the 90 patients booked in for appointments, with letters sent three weeks in advance, did not arrive. Those are people missing scans and critical tests vital for their journey to treatment and their pathway to better health. That is the real-world impact on people who are unable to receive the urgent treatment they need.
What is the cause? Clearly, the changing structure of the postal and parcel market is causing problems for Royal Mail. Some of that is clearly about Ofcom’s lack of powers or ability to use them. Much of it is about the culture and management of Royal Mail. Whichever combination of those issues it is, we need the Government to address the problem and sort it out on behalf of my constituents.
Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this debate on Royal Mail performance. Royal Mail’s reliability has become a big problem nationally, as we can all see. Alongside many parliamentary colleagues, I wrote to the Minister to raise serious concerns about delivery, which has simply not been good enough. I noticed it when I tried to invite my constituents to a local “Tea with your MP” event and half the invitations failed to arrive before the event, which caused much consternation.
I completely understand why people are deeply worried about missing critical, time-sensitive mail, which my casework shows. One constituent, like others, received a letter from the hospital after a vital medical appointment, so she missed it. An elderly resident had her phone cut off by BT because Royal Mail failed to deliver her paper bills. She does not have the internet and relies entirely on the post to stay connected. Others have resorted to getting their own mail from sorting offices, but in Cornwall, where it is hard to get around by public transport, particularly to sorting offices with limited opening hours, that has caused a real issue. The picture nationally is just as concerning. Citizens Advice reported that over Christmas 2025, 16 million people experienced letter delays, a 50% jump on the previous year, and 5.7 million adults missed vital letters about health appointments, benefit decisions and legal notices.
Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)
My hon. Friend talks about medical appointments, and I was horrified to hear from a constituent of mine in his 80s who did not have post for a whole month recently. He was waiting for bank cards and medical correspondence, and missed an appointment because of that lack of post. My hon. Friend mentioned rural areas. Does she agree with me that not receiving post makes people a lot more vulnerable?
Jayne Kirkham
Yes, indeed—particularly my elderly residents who simply cannot get around. It will be the same in my hon. Friend’s area.
Like other Members, I have visited my local delivery offices. The staff do an incredible job, but they are under-resourced and there just are not enough of them. Royal Mail continues to fall short under both its original and renegotiated universal service obligation. Even with the lowered targets, performance is well below the standard. I welcome the road map to rebuild the targets, but there are still serious structural concerns about that. We must make sure that these regulatory and service improvements are delivered without delay so we can make sure that our constituents are not disconnected from their communities, missing their hospital appointments, or unable to meet important bills.
Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)
I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a member of the CWU. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this important debate. Of course, Ms Lewell, it is a pleasure to serve in this debate with you in the Chair.
If we need an example of disaster and chaos in privatising a public asset, we need look no further than Royal Mail. The water industry is a close challenger, but we would have an even longer debate if we were to discuss the issues in Royal Mail versus the issues in the privatised water industry. We need to recognise that in 2013 Royal Mail was privatised by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition. It is important to know that the root cause of the issues is that privatisation, which has been a disaster. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Anna Dixon) mentioned that one option we should consider is renationalising Royal Mail, and I support that.
In my constituency of Stockport, I conducted an online survey—I do not need to reiterate the points about doing postal surveys, which would probably never get there or come back in time—and 89% of respondents experienced a service disruption or delays to Royal Mail deliveries and were dissatisfied with Royal Mail. I do not want to repeat the points that have already been made, but I have also been to my local delivery office on numerous occasions and the postal men and women do a fantastic job. None of us in this House on a cross-party basis has issues with our postal workers. The issue is with the toxic management, how the business is run and the lack of governance. It could be argued that Royal Mail management is better off paying the fine than actually meeting its obligations to the public. Stamp prices keep going up, but letter deliveries keep getting worse. The hon. Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard) suggested that there should be no further rises in the price of stamps until Royal Mail can demonstrate on a long-term basis that it has consistently improved letter delivery standards.
Just this week a resident reported that a first-class letter took over 10 days to arrive and they received birthday cards a week late. Another constituent, from Ainsdale Grove in Reddish in my constituency, contacted me to say that their entire street received large batches of delayed post, with some letters dating back to 25 September. That is completely unacceptable. As I said, I am a proud member of the CWU, but I want to see Royal Mail management working with the CWU. There have been reports that almost 400 postal workers are leaving their jobs at Royal Mail—there must be an extremely toxic culture for that number of people to be leaving. I could say a lot more, but time is limited.
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this debate. Like many colleagues from across the House, I have received a litany of complaints from constituents. I visited my local delivery office back in the summer with a massive dossier of those complaints. That was just at the beginning of the roll-out of the new delivery model known as DM26, which the management there reassured me would solve all my constituents’ postal delays. Unfortunately, I continue to receive testimonies from constituents about the impact of late deliveries. I will share a couple of the most impactful ones.
One constituent’s elderly parents live in Cottingley. The father is 82 and the mother has dementia at 79. They do not use a computer. They have missed three NHS appointments and incurred additional charges on mobile phones, and when their children tried to raise a complaint online, they found it very difficult. The second area is Crossflatts. A constituent there has had three hospital appointment letters delivered after the appointment date, and as we have heard from other Members, birthday cards have gone missing too.
None of us blames the posties. They do a fantastic job, but we need to make sure that they are working in an environment that supports their health and wellbeing. We can see that there is low morale and there are high rates of sickness absence, which I hope the Minister will address in her remarks. We must also not level down. There is a real problem with the wider gig economy, and I echo my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) in asking how the Minister will address bogus self-employment in the wider parcel delivery market so that Royal Mail and its workers have a chance.
I urge the Minister to really focus her remarks on the fact that Royal Mail is a failing company. It is in financial distress. We have a regulatory model with Ofcom that is clearly not working. The financial penalties are not working. Ofcom is almost at the limit of its powers to force Royal Mail management to get its act together and address these problems. We have changed the universal service obligation once. We have introduced this new delivery model, or at least Royal Mail is introducing this new delivery model. If we get to April next year and there is still a failure to meet that USO, will the Minister look at radical options, including the nationalisation of Royal Mail?
Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
It is a privilege and an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) on her incredible speech and on securing this debate. We have heard during the debate from all four corners of the United Kingdom; this is a significant challenge for constituents up and down the country.
As we get towards Christmas, I am sure that all Members have a visit to the sorting centre in their diary. It always feels a little poignant to me, because one of my heroes, David Penhaligon from Cornwall, died on the way to a sorting centre in 1986 while discharging his duties as a community MP. I have been offered a visit to the Torquay centre twice, and on the second occasion I said, “No, I would like to go to Paignton.” Strangely enough, I discovered that the Paignton office was somewhat crowded and unruly. Despite the chaos, the posties were doing incredible work attempting to get the post out to people, but it feels as if there is a bit of gamesmanship in what Royal Mail wants Members to see—or not see. My hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Martin Wrigley) visited a sorting centre, and posties advised him that the undelivered post was hidden at the back of the office. There are some sharp practices occurring, which I am well aware of.
Nikki in my constituency tells me she got an enhanced parking fine because the notice was three weeks late. She then—eventually—received post from an enforcement organisation chasing her up for the unpaid fine. That is utterly shameful, and it echoes what we have heard from around the Chamber about delays in finance-related letters, whether statements or card deliveries, and people being unable to complete transactions that they desperately need to complete.
Perhaps the most poignant issue is missed appointments—I will not rehearse the points that have been made, but I am aware of a number of examples in my constituency—which impact not only people’s health, but the hospitals; we know about the challenges in our health service. We are seeing the Royal Mail, in effect, vandalising the service by failing to deliver post in a timely manner, which is utterly shocking.
Turning to the most vulnerable, colleagues have talked about people in remote areas, and I am shocked but no longer surprised when I go around former council estates by the number of older folk who do not have access to the internet and do not have a smartphone. The reality of the way they communicate is post, and they have to use a very poor postal system. Those individuals simply cannot be accessed digitally, so they desperately need the post. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government are looking to hold Royal Mail to account, because this is far from being the posties’ fault.
Colleagues from different sides of the political spectrum have talked about surveys that they have undertaken. Like them, I have heard from dozens of people about the challenges, the most worrying of which was big batches of post arriving at once. When I have raised concerns with Royal Mail, I have received, in effect, bureaucratic drivel. I say diplomatically to the Minister that I was disappointed by the lack of backbone in the letter that we received. I hope we will hear better today.
I am still waiting to hear from Ofcom, but I am looking forward to working with it and the Communication Workers Union to hold people to account. Liberal Democrats believe the Government must maximise the powers of Ofcom, give it teeth and encouraging it to use them, to make sure we have a firm hand on the tiller so that we can navigate the stormy waters facing our posties—and make sure that this is sorted by Christmas.
Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this important debate. She is clearly delivering for her constituents in a way that Royal Mail is not.
Royal Mail is clearly failing in its universal service obligation, and it is clear from comments across the House that there is universality in those failings. From my own casework, I came into this debate well aware of the widespread failures affecting our postal services and knowing that action is long overdue. After hearing the compelling story shared by Members from across the House, I believe it is undeniable that we cannot wait any longer, and that answers are well overdue.
It is only 65 days until Christmas. It is not quite time to put the tree up, but for service providers and logistics teams, it is right around the corner, and mailbags will surge. We all know that Christmas is one of the most demanding times of the year for the postal services, especially for our hard-working postmen and women. I too want to express my thanks to them. I do not think any of us are frustrated with our hard-working posties. There are failings with management. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith) pointed out, all year round, posties are a lifeline for some of the most vulnerable members of our society, and sometimes they are the only person they will see or have social contact with.
Anna Dixon
In rural areas, posties are often already doing extremely long routes. Does the shadow Minister recognise that the new delivery model is breaking up some of the continuity that postal workers have with their communities and making some rural rounds less manageable for them?
Bradley Thomas
The hon. Member is correct. The current model is not working as it should, which is having social implications and, clearly, adversely affecting the service even further. It is crucial that that is addressed.
As we get close to the Christmas period, the busiest time of the year—as shoppers complete their final online orders and families send gifts and cards to loved ones, friends and family—the country needs confidence that postal services will deliver. If they can deliver, that is one worry ticked off the list at a busy time of year, but in recent years, many of us and our constituents have found that there is a certain elusiveness to the post all year round. My constituents have the recurring experience of receiving no post for two weeks, followed by a large bundle of outdated letters, with hospital appointments missed—we have heard many stories on that theme today—DVLA reminders overdue, credit cards reported lost in the mail, and even legal issues rumbling on because court summons and other documents are not received in time.
Jim Shannon
On the point about health-related letters, when I met the former Health Minister in Northern Ireland, he gave us an undertaking about franked envelopes as a way forward. If Royal Mail did its job correctly, it would receive the franked letters and expedite them through the system. That seems to be working in my constituency, because, by and large, the postal workers do that very effectively. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that Royal Mail and others responsible need to focus as a priority on delivering letters that are obviously medical letters, because they are franked, on time?
Bradley Thomas
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which is in the same spirit as a comment by the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), who mentioned an example of NHS letters being prioritised. There is a pressing need for Royal Mail to look at best practice from all parts of the country and ensure that it is part of its standard methods of operation, so that it delivers for its customers and our constituents.
We know that a malfunctioning postal service has a profound domino effect on many important aspects of residents’ lives. In March, it was announced that Royal Mail will deliver 219 million letters late this year, despite the seventh stamp price rise in four years. That statistic will come as no surprise to the Members here today—it has been cited by many and it solidifies their constituents’ lived experiences—but predictability should not be mistaken for acceptability. Our constituents should not have to tolerate this escalating issue, so I ask the Minister to outline today a tangible plan to deliver a swift solution, rather than continuing to pass the buck to Ofcom. I am aware of Ofcom’s role as the regulator, but the Government cannot expect this nationwide problem to fall exclusively on Ofcom’s shoulders. I suspect that the Minister has received that message loud and clear from Members across the House today.
What action are the Government taking to materially address the service problem? Do they believe that Ofcom is still fit for purpose with regard to regulating postal services? Those are difficult questions to answer, but my constituents—all our constituents—want answers to them. The Minister has made it clear that frank discussions are being held with the CEO of Royal Mail, and Royal Mail has emphasised that its “Quality of Service Improvement Plan” sets out—allegedly—a clear path towards meeting Ofcom’s new delivery targets.
We saw how important this issue is when it was raised at Prime Minister’s questions today. But what good are more discussions and promises if they are never fulfilled or fail to improve the service? Does the Minister believe that the operational issues with Royal Mail are being addressed quickly enough? What discussions have taken place concerning not only the implementation of the improvement plan, but the success achieved so far?
Royal Mail is a key piece of British identity, with more than 500 years of history. It has endured challenges and played a key role in some of our nation’s most difficult times. It is a service to appreciate, but such recognition is warranted only when an acceptable standard of service is provided. The purpose of this debate is to highlight the unacceptable service being supplied by Royal Mail and to fast-track finding a solution. Will the Minister share the immediate steps that she will take to ensure that Royal Mail’s service is corrected and customer confidence restored?
The Minister for the Future of Work (Kate Dearden)
Good afternoon, Ms Lewell; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) on securing this debate about the performance of Royal Mail. She clearly outlined the issues in her constituency. She has heard directly from constituents about the inadequate service, and I thank her for bringing that to the Chamber, as I thank other colleagues for doing the same. This is not the first debate on Royal Mail in the House, but it is my first debate as the Minister responsible, and it is a pleasure to respond to it. I take this part of my brief extremely seriously, and I hear the challenges we are working through loud and clear.
Royal Mail should be a cornerstone of our national infrastructure, serving every address in the UK under its universal service obligation. As we have heard, people and businesses continue to rely on its services every single day, and posties are such valued members of the communities they serve. Royal Mail is an independent business, and the Government are not involved in its day-to-day operations or resolving specific service issues, but patience with its performance is wearing thin. Colleagues will have heard that loud and clear from the Prime Minister at the Dispatch Box earlier this afternoon. Customers have every right to expect better.
Royal Mail must do more to restore confidence in its service. That is why I was frank in my meeting with the chief executive of Royal Mail last month, and will continue to be so for as long as necessary. We are clear that the service has been unacceptable for too long and that the pace of improvement must increase quickly. Although letter volumes have fallen from 20 billion items per year in the mid-2000s to 6.5 billion in 2025, the number of addresses served by the universal postal service has continued to grow, and we should reflect on that.
Catherine Fookes
I want to raise the issue of the prioritisation of parcels. As the Minister says, the volume of letters may have gone down, but the overall volume of items to deliver has not. She will be as worried as me that the number of people working in Royal Mail has reduced significantly, and many people are leaving because of low morale. What can she do to make Ofcom do more in this situation—for example, spot checks? Fines are obviously not working.
Kate Dearden
I thank my hon. Friend for raising those important points. I will shortly turn to the work we are doing with Ofcom and the engagement I have had with it so far.
Postal services remain absolutely essential, delivering everything from medical letters to financial information and birthday and greeting cards from loved ones—as well as, soon, Christmas cards. At the same time, the rapid increase from e-commerce over recent years has transformed the postal sector. Parcel volumes for 2025-26 reached 1.44 billion—a 7% increase from ’24-25. I am conscious that, with Christmas coming up soon, Royal Mail will be entering its busiest period of the year, as we have heard from colleagues. It is vital that it delivers a reliable service for its customers.
Royal Mail is an independent business, so responsibility for managing delivery operations, workforce deployment and local performance rests with its management, and it is best placed to investigate localised problems. However, I am all too aware that customers across the country continue to be let down by Royal Mail’s poor service. Many hon. Members receive correspondence from constituents highlighting their concerns and frustrations about Royal Mail’s performance, and colleagues have raised them today, as I have, too.
Steve Darling
I am sure that many Members present will have already raised local issues with Royal Mail and got back what feels very much like a stock letter, as I did. What advice would the Minister give to Members about how to hold it to account for such an appalling service?
Kate Dearden
I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for his intervention. I will very shortly turn in more detail to my engagement with Royal Mail, and the expectations that I have put to it for how it should engage with us in this House with appropriate detail and information.
The consequences of delays can be especially significant when correspondence is important and time-sensitive, such as correspondence regarding hospital appointments, bills, legal documents, benefit correspondence or letters containing driving licences. I share the frustrations and concerns of hon. Members and their constituents. That is exactly why Royal Mail must do more to deliver a reliable service.
Before I reflect on my engagements with the chief executive and my correspondence with hon. Members in this Chamber and outside, I will turn to Ofcom. As the independent regulator for postal services, Ofcom is responsible for setting and enforcing Royal Mail’s service standards. I met Ofcom yesterday to share the feedback I received from hon. Members across the House ahead of this debate—I will also reflect on today’s contributions—and to discuss the wider postal sector. Ofcom has fined Royal Mail £37 million over three years for not meeting quality-of-service targets. Ofcom assured me and the Government that it continues to monitor Royal Mail service data closely and will take further regulatory action, where needed, to hold the company to account.
Ofcom is also investigating Royal Mail’s performance against quality-of-service targets in the last financial year. I know that several hon. Members, some of them in the Chamber, met Ofcom on Wednesday 14 October to raise their frustrations about the continued poor service from Royal Mail. Ofcom has shared the key themes from that discussion with me and my officials. I thank colleagues for taking the time last week. I have no doubt that Ofcom will have heard and understood the strength of feeling about the service that our constituents have experienced.
I will turn briefly to costs, particularly the cost of stamps, which lots of colleagues have mentioned. Last week, Ofcom launched a consultation on extending the current second-class letter price cap until 2028. Of course, every pound counts when people are still struggling with the cost of living crisis, yet they are not getting a reliable postal service. I hope that will be a key consideration, but I recognise that it is for Royal Mail, as an independent business, to set the price of stamps. Ofcom and I discussed that yesterday.
The regulator sponsorship charter, which the Government published in July, reaffirms our role in setting regulators’ strategic direction and holding them to account. We will continue to work closely with Ofcom on its approach to regulation and the outcomes it delivers for customers. We would pragmatically consider any future requests for additional powers where they are needed to support improved outcomes for customers and our constituents. We will actively hold Ofcom and other regulators to account, as appropriate.
Anna Dixon
In addition to meeting Ofcom, as the Minister mentioned, we also met the leadership of the CWU. It is clear that postal workers are coming forward with ideas about how the business could be reformed. I hope the Minister will assure us that she is urging Royal Mail’s leadership to sit down with the CWU to consider some of the more radical, long-term options for reforming our Royal Mail.
Kate Dearden
I will provide an update on our next steps, and our engagement with the unions and Royal Mail, very shortly. All hon. Members present agree that Royal Mail needs to step up and improve its performance. Colleagues reflected on the improvement plan published by Royal Mail to address the primary cause of service issues. It has committed to invest £500 million to increase its frontline resourcing and the availability of working hours for part-time employees. I reflect on the point about suitable sorting offices, using modern technology. We have secured legally binding commitments from the new owners for sufficient investment to ensure that the USO can be delivered.
Jim Shannon
I thank the Minister for her comprehensive response. I appreciate it; each of us in the Chamber does. One massive issue in my constituency of Strangford is staff retention. There comes a certain age, as the years creep up, when the weather goes against you. Some of those who joined early and have done maybe 20 or 30 years come to a stage where they can no longer do it. One of the major reasons why they are not able to do it, apart from the weather factor, is that they are able to get a better wage up the road. To retain staff, wages need to reflect rising inflation and the fact that staff have to travel to work. What discussions has the Minister had with the chief executive to ensure that wages improve, which will naturally help to retain staff?
Kate Dearden
Before I address the hon. Gentleman’s point, and reflecting on his remarks about visiting his local sorting offices and what he is hearing from posties themselves, I put on record that Royal Mail has informed me that it has invested more than £470 million since 2021 in automation and in delivery and infrastructure updates. Of course, when it comes to pay and conditions, we work closely with the trade unions represented in Royal Mail, and we will consider the wider support we can provide to create a sustainable future for Royal Mail. Supporting our posties is absolutely essential.
I also take this opportunity to reflect on my recent meeting with the chief executive of Royal Mail, at which I specifically raised the issue of engagement with colleagues. I urged Royal Mail to be much more proactive with MPs, and much more detailed in its assessments of what is happening at constituency level, and to take seriously every complaint raised directly with it by colleagues, whether the complaint is about performance, service, staffing levels, sickness or absences. It is important that Members across the House have relevant information to hand. When Members, myself included, receive numerous complaints from constituents, it is important that they have the appropriate and relevant information to make that assessment. I reassure Members that I always reiterate that point when I meet Royal Mail.
Charlie Maynard
If possible, I would love to hear the Minister’s thoughts about the points I raised: linking targets to stamp price increases, escalating fines, transparency, and ringfencing Royal Mail’s cash.
Kate Dearden
Hopefully, the hon. Member has reflected on my remarks about my engagement with Ofcom, particularly on its recent consultation on stamps, the cost of living crisis, service and targets. I have heard his remarks and will take them forward in my conversations, particularly around Royal Mail’s service, which has to improve, and improve very quickly, as the Prime Minister reiterated today. I thank the hon. Member for putting his reflections on the record.
On USO reform, Royal Mail is currently implementing a new delivery model, as we all know and have discussed today. That new delivery model was approved by the CWU and its membership, and it is being implemented across the network. Colleagues have reflected on different feedback from their constituents, posties and local management.
Royal Mail’s performance against its quality-of-service targets has been improving, so it is important that any final issues between the company and its workforce in rolling out the new approach are resolved urgently. Today, I reaffirm the commitment given by the Secretary of State yesterday that we are meeting the CWU and Royal Mail the week after next to press for progress. We will update colleagues on that meeting.
I also want to reflect on what colleagues have said about our important, absolutely essential postal workers, who are a central part of every city, town and village we represent. Indeed, they are integral to their communities’ future success. Posties work tirelessly every single day for constituents and customers, and Royal Mail must ensure that they remain at the heart of a business that delivers in line with all our expectations.
I put on record my appreciation for our postal workers and posties across the country. My grandad was a very proud postie. He loved his community and he loved his job, because it is about much more than delivering letters and parcels. Posties are part of the communities they serve. They know their rounds and their customers. Often, they are one of the familiar faces that people see every day; sometimes, they are the only familiar face that people see. I therefore take the time to express my appreciation.
It is in everyone’s interest to get round the table to resolve the issues we have discussed today, including the need for an improvement in the quality of service—we must make sure that happens quickly. Indeed, that is my commitment to all colleagues in Westminster Hall today.
Before I conclude, I will talk about parcels and the need to address the imbalances in the postal sector, which is an important part of the next steps, and update colleagues on the work we are doing in the Department in this space. We are improving the working conditions, standards and rights of workers across the economy, including in the delivery sector, which is really important to me.
Last week, we published a consultation on proposals for targeted reforms of the employment status framework for employment rights. We recognise that self-employment arrangements can provide flexibility for some people, but we are also aware of the concern that the current employment status framework can leave vulnerable workers without core and basic employment protections and rights. Our consultation hopes to address those issues, particularly around bogus self-employment, which colleagues have reflected on today, taking into account the impact on key sectors of the economy, including the postal services industry.
Yesterday, colleagues and I attended an interesting roundtable on work and employment in UK parcel delivery, held with the University of Sheffield Management School, where we talked about exactly these issues. Its research is important and will feed directly into our work in this space. Across the sector, Ofcom has reacted to growing concern about delivery performance by reminding operators of their obligations, and it has engaged with all major parcel companies to ensure their compliance with the regulatory framework.
Although this debate focuses on the performance of Royal Mail, it is important to recognise that reliable delivery matters across the postal and parcel delivery market. That is particularly the case for our vulnerable constituents, as service failures can have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable consumers, including disabled people who might often struggle to leave their homes. Ofcom has introduced targeted protections that require operators to have appropriate policies in place for the fair treatment of disabled customers, alongside strengthened guidance on complaints handling. Lots of colleagues mentioned that today, and I will continue to press Ofcom and Royal Mail where I need to.
The way we communicate might be changing, but post remains an essential service for people and businesses across the United Kingdom. The Government believe that the performance of Royal Mail has been unacceptable: I have made that clear, as has the Prime Minister. The Secretary of State also made it clear in his response, published yesterday, to the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee’s report. We will continue to press Royal Mail and its management to improve the quality of its service. Customers rightly expect and deserve a reliable postal service, and colleagues from all parties expect their constituents to have it, too. Royal Mail absolutely must deliver it, and deliver it soon.
Again, I pay tribute to and thank our incredible posties across the country who work tirelessly to deliver for our constituents and support their communities. Royal Mail is a national institution that is a key part of our identity, and we all want it to succeed. We are passionate about the universal postal service on which we all rely. I hope colleagues hear my passion about ensuring that we get people round the table so that we can deliver a better service for our constituents, through the wider postal sector and Royal Mail. I thank colleagues for their reflections and contributions, and I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley for securing this debate.
Sorcha Eastwood
I thank the Minister, the shadow Minister, the Lib Dem spokesperson and all right hon. and hon. Members who contributed to this really good debate. We have fleshed out some of the core issues, and colleagues across the Chamber have made helpful suggestions on the price of stamps, the link to targets, the payment of executive bonuses when targets continue to be missed and the fact that we need to give serious consideration to whether Royal Mail should have been privatised at all.
This issue is absolutely not the fault of posties, and I thank them for their service. It is incumbent on us all to listen to them.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the performance of Royal Mail.