Performance of Royal Mail

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Monday 26th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I could list all the issues that my constituents have raised about this issue, but we would be here all night. I concur with a lot of other Members, and I will give some examples.

We have a shortage of posties, so I am doing what I can to encourage young people to join the postal service, but clearly I am not going to solve that problem on my own. When I met Royal Mail’s leadership, they said to me, “Don’t worry—in one week, you’ll get a Monday, Wednesday and Friday delivery, and the next week it’s a Tuesday and Thursday delivery,” as though that is somehow okay. That is how the system operates in theory, but a constituent applied for a 60+ oyster card that took so long to arrive that they had to buy a monthly pass, costing over £200, while they were waiting. One constituent received divorce papers weeks late, and five constituents reported not receiving their postal vote for a recent by-election. Exactly as colleagues have said, people are just not bothering to vote because the postal vote is so inefficient.

As a canvasser, I panic when I ask someone whether they have voted and they have not posted it yet. If there is only a week to go, I get worried about them putting it in the post. I will start explaining how to go to the polling station to deliver it, and I will see immediately that they lose interest, even if they were going to be around on election day. One constituent nearly lost her home because of delays with their pension administrator sending information backwards and forwards. Letters were not received, and she experienced many delays in getting her pension in place.

I will give a couple of local examples. In Hackney Wick, post was delivered on 23 June, 27 June, 1 July and 9 July, and then nothing until mid-August. In Dalston in my constituency, one resident did not receive any post for three months, and another road had no post for eight days. I could go on with such examples.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

As a London MP, my hon. Friend is describing the experience of my constituents as well. When I go to Royal Mail to try to interrogate its poor performance, it is required only to give performance data on the basis of the first part of the postcode, so poor performance in SE24 is disguised by average figures for the SE postcode area. Does she agree that it would be a step forward in Royal Mail’s accountability if it had to report performance on the delivery office area, rather than the whole district postcode area?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend saves me from having to repeat exactly the same point. We can all name roads in our constituencies that are not getting post, yet apparently it is being delivered in the wider area. There is one way we can all get our post. Guess what? If someone has a parcel delivered, their post will be delivered the same day, so it is more cost effective for some of us to get small, cheap things delivered and then suddenly receive our mail.

There is a bigger issue: the competitiveness of Royal Mail. Since the new owners took over, they have clearly been chasing the competitive parcel delivery market. We understand that how that would interact with Royal Mail was always going to be a challenge, but they seem to have completely junked the letter service. Other providers, some of which have been named, will send parcels. We can even email them our content, and they can mail merge it and put it in an envelope. Of course, in the end the Royal Mail delivers the last part, but we can do that at a discounted postal rate. The leadership at Royal Mail, which has a universal service obligation and the responsibility for delivering letters during the last stage of the journey, are not thinking ahead of the curve about how they could compete with the companies that are undercutting them. That seems utterly ridiculous.

I turn to the postal staff, because I have a number of constituents who are reluctant to raise their concerns. They want to raise them with me, but they say that they do not want to make a complaint because they like their postie. Who does not trust their postal worker? It is one of the most trusted professions. David Beckham, members of the royal family—although perhaps they do not get their mail delivered directly to their door—and top celebrities all trust our postal workers to deliver our post, and I have no doubt in my mind about their trustworthiness. This is a group of people who take huge pride in their jobs, and as we heard from the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), very often postal workers can tell us what the solutions are. Over the years I have interacted with Royal Mail, mostly in London for the past 25 years or so. Often the solution is described locally but not delivered by the central office. The new ownership are degrading our letter service, and if we are not careful, we will go down the path of the Danish service. We cannot lose this service.

There is a big challenge for the Minister. It is easy to talk about nationalisation, but that costs money. It could be that the leadership want to run themselves down so much that the Government step in, but we should not let Royal Mail off the hook. We need solutions, and we need them now.