this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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24
Royal Mail could save £650m by switching service to three days a week, says Ofcom (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 9 months ago by thehatfox@lemmy.world to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
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[–] Toda@programming.dev 88 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I hate to be a bore, and regurgitate the same "leftie" discourse that gets repeated a lot online, but:

Royal Mail would become “financially and operationally unsustainable in the long term”

This is because Royal Mail has become private and is now required to become profitable / increase it's value over time. Which is nonsense. It should be a public service funded by a mix of direct payment (e.g. stamps) and taxation.

If continuing to run six days per week, as the are currently obliged to, has become unsustainable then perhaps it is time it returns to public ownership.

[–] casmael@lemm.ee 15 points 9 months ago

Yeah nationalise it and send the executives to prison imo

[–] Ulvain@sh.itjust.works 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Canadian here - sorry if I don't know exactly how it works on your side of the pond.. but isn't your national post serving an important competitive function, keeping other (fully private) mailing and courrier services in the pricing ballpark?

If it reduces the quality of service, it won't suddenly reduce the need to receive stuff by mail (particularly in this new Amazon world), and private companies would fill the void - at the consumer's expense, no?

[–] OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

So for most people royal mail is not particularly competitive for parcels.

They're great for letters, and if you live somewhere that's hard to get to they are often the only option for parcels. But for most people, most deliveries from Amazon etc won't come via them. Instead they'll come via much cheaper and crappier private companies.

That's for two reasons. 1. Because royal mail has to deliver everywhere for a similar price, the prices for easy destinations are more expensive and subsidize people living in hard to reach locations. 2. They pay their staff an actual salary rather than per package delivered.

So you have a parcel operation that can't make money because it is stuck with uniform pricing across the country, and a letter business which used to make money but is slowly dying.

[–] Patch@feddit.uk 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

but isn't your national post serving an important competitive function, keeping other (fully private) mailing and courrier services in the pricing ballpark?

private companies would fill the void - at the consumer's expense, no?

Royal Mail is fully private; no part of it is nationally owned.

It was sold off on the cheap a decade ago (while it was still profitable) with a major "caveat emptor" stipulation that the universal service obligation would remain as it was.

The private owners have since hived off the profitable parcel delivery arm (GLS) into a legally distinct entity, and have started whinging that the now isolated letter delivery business is unprofitable without degrading the service obligation.

It's a cynical move.

[–] obinice@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'd they're going to significantly degrade the quality of their service they'll reduce their prices appropriately to match this downgrade...

....right?

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"The Post Office, the same lack of quality and attention to detail but now less often."

[–] Koof_on_the_Roof@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

They will be bad less often…So an improvement in quality, no?

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 3 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Royal Mail could save up to £650m if it delivered letters just three days a week and £200m by stopping Saturday deliveries, the communications regulator has said.

In a much-anticipated review, Ofcom laid out a series of options for the future of the universal service obligation (USO), which requires Royal Mail to deliver nationwide, six days a week, for a fixed price.

The regulator began gathering evidence to show how the future of the service may be reformed to better suit consumers’ needs last year, amid a long-term decline in letter volumes and a surge in the number of parcels sent as online shopping has grown.

Ofcom said there was an increasing risk that Royal Mail would become “financially and operationally unsustainable in the long term”, given the cost of delivering the USO.

It has conducted consumer research and modelled Royal Mail’s finances in the review, and will seek views with a further update planned later this year.

Melanie Dawes, the chief executive of Ofcom, said: “Postal workers are part of the fabric of our society and are critical to communities up and down the country.

The original article contains 522 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] lud@lemm.ee 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The government owned postal service did that where I live. They went from deliveries every weekday to every other weekday, so some weeks you get post twice and some thrice.

It works pretty well and I haven't really noticed any negatives. First class parcels and express mail are still delivered every weekday. Normal letters get delayed slightly but that doesn't really matter because you rarely get mail anyways and it's never that time critical.

The only mail that most get are from government agencies and you can get that delivered digitally nowadays.