Covid-19 Pandemic: Royal Mail Services

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 19th April 2022 Westminster Hall

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Royal Mail services and the covid-19 pandemic.

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair today, Ms Ali. This is the third debate that I have secured on the performance of Royal Mail in as many years. I have done so because, as a company, Royal Mail is continuing to fail residents and businesses in my constituency and in many places across the country.

Royal Mail provides a vital frontline service. Throughout the covid-19 pandemic, postal workers continued to go to work to deliver letters and parcels, and, in addition to their core responsibilities, often provided vital contact for vulnerable residents living on their own during lockdown. I pay tribute to their bravery, dedication and service. I regularly meet postal workers in my constituency and representatives from their union, the Communication Workers Union. I am absolutely clear that the issue at Royal Mail is a failure of management and that the problems are structural.

The problems with Royal Mail first came to prominence in my constituency in 2017 when it announced plans to close two delivery offices in my constituency: the SE22 delivery office on Silvester Road and the SE27 delivery office on Windsor Grove. It was clear to local residents and elected representatives that the closures would be a disaster for postal delivery services. Following a large campaign, Royal Mail decided not to close the SE27 delivery office, but it pressed ahead with the closure of the SE22 office in autumn 2018, shortly before Christmas.

The closure of the SE22 delivery office heralded a disastrous deterioration in the reliability of postal services for local residents in the SE22 area. The delivery office was merged with the SE15 delivery office in Peckham, which is too small to cope with the volume of parcels for two postcode areas. It is located a considerable distance from the furthest parts of SE22 and the area has challenging topography. When the office initially closed, it is no exaggeration to say that services collapsed, with many streets not receiving postal deliveries for days or weeks at a time and customers having to queue for hours to pick up parcels. The situation was completely chaotic.

Following the initial Christmas peak in 2018, services improved somewhat, but ever since that time it has been clear that Royal Mail has no resilience in the SE15 delivery office and can maintain a satisfactory level of service only when all conditions are optimal. Whenever there are any increased pressures due to peak periods, staff sickness or adverse weather, the service in large parts of SE22 quickly becomes completely unreliable.

The consequences of poor and unreliable postal delivery services for my constituents have been severe. I have heard from constituents who have missed medical appointments or, perhaps even worse during the pandemic, turned up at hospital for appointments that had been cancelled. They have lost important legal documents and have had to attend court because they missed the deadline for paying speeding fines.

During the pandemic there have been many heart-rending stories that illustrate the important role that postal services still play in people’s lives, including children not receiving any birthday cards during lockdown, handmade gifts from grandparents for newborn babies not being delivered, and residents who have been relying on post from family and friends to fend off loneliness and isolation waiting weeks at a time for their post.

In addition, my constituency is home to the Mark Allen Group—a magazine publisher that produces 114 publications, including Farmers Weekly, which is delivered nationwide on Fridays. The publisher has highlighted the unreliability of postal delivery services in many parts of the country as a serious threat to the viability of its business. It has noticed significant subscription cancellations, which correspond with unreliable postal delivery services.

Magazine publishers are worth £3.74 billion to the UK economy and employ more than 55,000 people. The Mark Allen Group in my constituency supports hundreds of jobs in journalism, printing and distribution. It is reliant on Royal Mail for the sustainability of its business. It is no exaggeration to say that the Royal Mail failures are putting jobs at risk. Citizens Advice, the consumer advocate for the postal sector, also confirms that the kinds of failures seen in my constituency are common across the country. It estimates that 16.5 million customers were hit by letter delays in January 2021, and 15 million were left waiting for letters during the festive period 2021-22. It also highlights the rapidly increasing cost of Royal Mail services. The price of a first-class stamp has increased by almost 50% in just five years, leaving customers paying much more for a poorer service.

I have engaged extensively with Royal Mail, the CWU and Ofcom since 2017 about the problems in SE22, and during the covid-19 pandemic problems in other postcode areas in my constituency, especially SE19, SE24 and SE27. My engagement with Ofcom has been, frankly, extremely disappointing. There appeared to be very little interest in the severe problems affecting my constituents, and no meaningful action that Ofcom, as the regulator, was willing or able to take in response. It is clear to me that there are considerable problems with the regulatory framework that have made it impossible for Royal Mail to be held to account when its services fail.

I believe that five measures are urgently needed to put this situation right. There is currently no requirement on Royal Mail to undertake public consultation on a decision to close a delivery office, despite the obvious significant impact that a closure can have on a local community. In the case of SE22, every single concern that local residents raised about the closure has come to pass. Royal Mail sold the SE22 delivery office for £7 million. There was no requirement to reinvest any of the receipt in the provision of local services. I urge the Minister to ask Ofcom to introduce a new requirement for meaningful public consultation on delivery office closures, and to instigate an independent analysis of the impact on local services that must be submitted to Ofcom and signed off before a closure can take place. We will not accept further delivery office closures in Dulwich and West Norwood.

Royal Mail is required only to report quality of service data at the level of the first part of the postcode. That has consistently meant that the catastrophically poor performance in SE22 and other postcodes in my constituency has been masked by performance data across the wider SE postcode area, which covers a vast swathe of south-east London. In effect, that has made it impossible to secure any regulatory action for my constituents. I have made repeated requests over a number of years for Royal Mail to provide more granular performance data, and they have always been refused. That gives rise to concerns about transparency and accountability. I urge the Minister to ask Ofcom to require Royal Mail to report performance data at the level of local postcodes, so that regulatory action can be taken more easily on individual delivery offices when they fail.

The partial suspension of the universal service obligation during the pandemic effectively removed all regulatory levers from Ofcom in relation to Royal Mail. Across many streets in my constituency, residents have reported periods when post was not delivered for weeks at a time. When I raised those problems with Royal Mail, it systematically denied the extent of the problem, refused to acknowledge backlogs of mail sitting in delivery offices—that miraculously were cleared when I made a short-notice visit to at least one of the delivery offices in question—and denied the extent of the gaps in delivery.

I am completely clear that Royal Mail has regularly been in breach of the USO in my constituency, but there has been no action from Ofcom, leaving Royal Mail entirely unaccountable for the quality of its services. The Government must therefore require Ofcom to review the universal service obligation to ensure that meaningful regulatory action can always be taken when there are breaches and, in circumstances in which the USO is partially or fully suspended, that there is no vacuum of regulation.

Finally, it is unacceptable for the public to be asked to pay more for less, particularly at a time when the cost of living crisis is bearing down on so many people across the country. I ask the Minister to respond to the request from Citizens Advice and to ask Ofcom to carry out a full assessment of the affordability of postal products, in the light of the jump in first-class stamp prices. My constituents are utterly exasperated by the lack of action from Royal Mail, Ofcom and the Government in response to the failures of Royal Mail in my constituency. The privatisation of this vital public service by the Tories and the Lib Dems has failed. The Government must urgently get a grip.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes]

I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to the debate. Two themes have run consistently through many of the contributions. The first is gratitude and appreciation for frontline postal delivery workers and acknowledgment of all that they have done during the pandemic, and I reiterate that once again. We are grateful to our postal workers up and down the country for the vital work they do.

The second theme is the frequent mismatch between the messages we all receive from Royal Mail as constituency MPs and the experiences of our constituents. I recognised, almost verbatim, the experience reported by the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Sarah Green) of being told by Royal Mail that deliveries were being alternated every other day in her constituency, and yet residents were reporting that they were not receiving post for weeks at a time. That has absolutely been my experience. The problem is not the timeliness of the response from Royal Mail; it is that it simply does not chime with the experiences of our constituents. They have no reason to exaggerate or make up their experiences of the postal delivery services. If post is arriving, there is not a problem. Yet, time and again people report that there is a problem. I am grateful to the Minister for his continued engagement on this issue, and I am sure that, like Royal Mail managers in my constituency, he is sick of hearing from me about it, but we will not rest, because Royal Mail’s services are so important.

I am disappointed that the Minister did not address the data reporting issue, which is critical. Royal Mail cannot be held accountable for local delivery office failures, which matter so much in specific communities, if it has to report its performance data only at a very broad level. The same is true of national satisfaction survey reporting: hearing that 80% of customers are happy is no comfort if someone lives in SE22 when the SE22 delivery office is failing.

I urge the Minister to step back from the briefings he receives from Royal Mail and Ofcom, to look at what people across the country are saying about the quality of the services they receive and to think about the role Government can play in getting a grip on what I believe is a failing organisation and in making sure that Royal Mail continues to deliver the post, but does so with a reliability that such a vital service demands across the country.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered Royal Mail services and the covid-19 pandemic.