Royal Mail: Performance

James Naish Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ward (Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this debate. I want first to put on the record my appreciation for Royal Mail staff, particularly those I met on Monday at the delivery office in Rottingdean in my constituency, where I saw how hard they are working to improve the local service.

Of course, we all want Royal Mail to succeed, because it is a universal postal service and something we all rely on. It is a truly national service and a source of good, unionised jobs. We should celebrate that more—frankly, we should do more to encourage other providers in the sector to match those employment standards and expectations. But we also have to ask how we can better support Royal Mail staff to do the job we all need them to do, and how our constituents can be sure that they will receive the service they rely on, because right now problems with Royal Mail is the one issue I get the most emails about—I was going to say letters, but it is actually emails.

I will give two quick examples. One constituent from Woodingdean in my constituency told me that they had no deliveries from 1 to 16 August this year, 29 pieces of mail on 17 August, no deliveries from 18 to 28 August, and 13 items of mail delivered on 29 August. When I raised this directly with Royal Mail locally, I was told:

“there are no current issues with the delivery of mail to your constituent’s address…deliveries are taking place six days a week”.

Frankly, it is hard to know how to relay that to constituents.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

A constituent in West Bridgford in my constituency showed me a letter they had received from TV Times, telling them that because Royal Mail had become so unreliable it was going to use a third party to deliver the magazine separately, to make sure they got it on time. Does that not say everything about the reliability of Royal Mail?

[Chris Ward]

I am afraid it does. As my hon. Friend’s intervention shows, some constituents are now routinely missing letters—letters informing them of NHS appointments, legal affairs, fines and so on. One even contacted me on Saturday to say that he had only just received his Labour party conference pass, some four weeks late. Members might think that a blessing in disguise and that we should be praising Royal Mail, but he was not too pleased.

We are now in a cycle of despair with Royal Mail, where constituents report unacceptable delays all the time and MPs from across the House come here to raise them. Successive Governments will say how terrible it all is and demand that Ofcom acts and Royal Mail improves, but Ofcom does not have the powers it needs and keeps fining Royal Mail for failure, despite the fact that Royal Mail cannot make a profit anyway. Royal Mail has no chance of hitting its legally mandated targets and no hope of competing on a level playing field, because operators in the same sector simply do not have the same regulatory or employment standards that we ask of Royal Mail.

The result is rising anger on all sides, a loss of faith in our national delivery service and, frankly, a belief that we cannot even get the post to run on time in this country. I know that the Minister cares deeply about the issue and is working hard on it, so I urge her to break that cycle: look at what more we can do in Parliament to level the playing field for Royal Mail, empower the regulator more, and give Royal Mail staff the opportunity they need to improve and modernise the service. If we do that in this Parliament—there is a majority for it and cross-party support—then we can finally get our national postal service back on track and serving our constituents as it should be.