Royal Mail

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms McDonagh, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Wantage (David Johnston) on securing this important debate.

I pay tribute to postal workers up and down the country for all that they have done throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Postal workers have been on the frontline. They have faced additional risks, and I know that the rate of coronavirus infection among postal workers has been significant. They have continued to provide vital delivery services and, more than that, have been a vital source of human contact for many people who have been self-isolating while living alone. Sometimes, they are the only person able to flag concerns about the health and wellbeing of residents. We all owe our postal workers a huge debt of gratitude.

It is worth noting how utterly inappropriate it was that, while Royal Mail’s frontline staff were continuing to deliver for the public, the then chief executive was spending the lockdown in Switzerland. I know that Royal Mail has undergone a change of leadership in recent months, and that is certainly very welcome.

My constituents understand the severe difficulties presented by the pandemic for all our public services, and Royal Mail is no exception. They understood the suspension of the universal service obligation in order to enable Saturday deliveries to be paused. They even understood when deliveries in some areas took place every other day, rather than daily. There is a great deal of good will and support for our postal workers. However, the problems experienced in parts of my constituency have at times dropped well below even a basic level of reliability. That is the issue that I will focus on, as well as the significant problems I have encountered with the monitoring and regulation of Royal Mail.

My focus is on the severe problems in the SE22 area of my constituency. Although there have also been periods of significant problems in SE19 and SE27, my understanding is that those have been primarily due to sickness absence linked to the pandemic and were relatively quickly resolved. The problems in SE22 run much deeper.

In 2017, Royal Mail announced its intention to close the SE22 delivery office, which serves East Dulwich, part of Dulwich Village and part of Peckham Rye, and merge it with the SE15 delivery office in Peckham. The local community protested against the plan, concerned that the SE15 office was difficult to access and very remote from some parts of SE22, and that it would be difficult for postal workers to complete their rounds because of the long distances and hilly nature of the routes between SE15 and parts of SE22. Royal Mail pressed ahead with the merger anyway just before the Christmas period in 2018, leading to a disastrous level of service at that time and chaos for many months afterwards. All the warning signs were there that Royal Mail’s arrangements for deliveries to SE22 lacked the resilience to cope with challenging circumstances.

At the start of the pandemic, delivery services in SE22 became completely unreliable, with residents on many different streets across the postcode area reporting that they were not receiving mail on a regular basis, sometimes for weeks at a time. That was a completely different scenario to pausing Saturday deliveries or even delivering only on alternate days, which residents would have understood completely.

The consequences for my constituents went way beyond inconvenience, though there was certainly plenty of inconvenience. The problems caused deep distress: older people living in isolation did not receive birthday cards and gifts; legal documents went missing; hospital appointments were missed; hospital appointments that had been cancelled due to the pandemic were still attended because the cancellation had not been received; death certificates went missing. One constituent had to attend court because she had not received a speeding fine in time to be able to pay it.

I have raised these issues with Royal Mail on behalf of every constituent who has been in touch with me. I have met Royal Mail on many occasions to seek answers and I visited the SE15 delivery office. It has been enormously frustrating that, although Royal Mail has responded to each individual query, it has never accepted the extent of problems with the service in SE22 or the impact on my constituents.

I have taken the matter to Ofcom, who also seemed powerless to intervene, largely due to the suspension of the universal service obligation. I hope the Minister will understand that there is a huge difference between pausing Saturday deliveries or delivering every other day and not providing any deliveries at all for weeks at a time. The accountability framework for a regulated service really should be able to account for that.

I have pieced together some of the problems and the action that Royal Mail could have been compelled to take if there had been more regulatory intervention. The first is not to have closed the SE22 delivery office in the first place, or to have been obliged to re-provide it in a more convenient location for SE22. There is currently no requirement for public consultation on the closure of delivery offices, and the requirement for the geographical coverage of delivery offices is too wide to protect an area such as SE22 from disastrous commercial decisions, and too wide, really, to be workable for an urban area such as London.

Once the severe problems became apparent last year, Royal Mail could have been required to explore temporary premises to alleviate the problems in the SE15 office, which were in part due to social distancing requirements, but it was not obliged to do so. It is also clear that over-reliance on vehicle sharing was a large part of the problem in SE22. Parts of SE22 are just too far away from the current delivery office to enable postal workers to set off by foot and complete their round within their shift.

Coronavirus meant that van sharing was no longer safe, but there was no requirement for Royal Mail to address that—as it did much later to good effect, by acquiring additional vehicles—apparently leaving large parts of SE22 unreachable for weeks at a time. It is also clear that staff sickness was a significant problem, as it was across many frontline services, but, again, there appeared to be no requirement on Royal Mail to take on additional staff to cover, despite the fact that it was responsible for a regulated service.

Finally, I want to flag immense problems with monitoring and accountability. Royal Mail has refused to provide me with performance data for the SE22 delivery office, despite problems over many months, which means that it is impossible to compare the experiences of my constituents against Royal Mail’s actual performance. The information provided by Royal Mail has often been far too broad to be properly transparent or useful. Royal Mail only publishes performance data at the level of south-east London, which is a huge area and entirely masks the variation in performance within individual postcode districts.



Royal Mail has been through a challenging time in recent years, due to competition from private delivery companies, but its fortunes have significantly improved during the pandemic and it recently reported record profits. As things stand, it will not be compelled to spend any of its profits on investing to deliver effective, reliable services for my constituents in SE22.

Royal Mail provides a regulated service, which is absolutely vital for residents and businesses across the country, and it is important that it is effectively regulated. I ask the Minister to look again at the regulatory framework for Royal Mail, in order to introduce a requirement for meaningful public consultation on proposals to close or move delivery offices, to tighten the rules on the geographical coverage of delivery offices in urban areas, and to introduce new performance data requirements to enable Royal Mail to be held to account in a meaningful way at the level of individual postcode districts.