Royal Mail: Performance

Joe Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I want to put on the record my thanks to the posties across the Hexham constituency. They traverse extremely rural areas to deliver post in some pretty challenging circumstances. It is a pleasure to represent them and their families.

Unfortunately, like some of the post in my experience, most of my speech will go undelivered, but I do want to speak a little bit about the impact of Royal Mail’s management, particularly its neglect of rural communities. A constituent recently arrived at the local sorting office to collect 15 items of important undelivered mail, including a cancer test result with a postmark dated two months earlier. My constituents and I find that there is a serious lack of accountability at Royal Mail, and that includes a failure to recognise the scale of the problem in my constituency and the scale of the issues affecting the rural constituencies who rely on the postal service as a lifeline.

There is much I would like to go into, but I want to focus particularly on the case of a constituent who I have been supporting. They requested for legal documents to be sent between two solicitors’ offices via recorded delivery, with proof of postage, at the beginning of December 2025. The documents never made it to the intended recipient. My constituent contacted Royal Mail customer service on numerous occasions, and spent 60 minutes on hold—they also got in contact via email, online and in person at the sorting office. All Royal Mail could say was that the documents are now considered lost.

I am sure we all want to hear assurances that Royal Mail will take action to improve its service and make full use of the Government’s commitment to support that. I urge the Government to press Royal Mail to ensure that future plans explicitly consider the needs of our most rural and sparsely populated communities.