Royal Mail has been fined for missing delivery targets: ain't privatisation great?

Royal Mail has been fined for missing delivery targets: ain’t privatisation great?

So Royal Mail has been fined for missing delivery targets: ain’t privatisation great?

We should all find this extra-annoying because the announcement has come during the Christmas period when the mail service is under its greatest strain.

Here‘s the BBC:

Royal Mail has been fined £10.5m by the regulator Ofcom for failing to meet delivery targets for first and second class mail.

The fine is almost double the penalty the company was hit with last year for the same reason.

Royal Mail was fined last year for missing its targets – and now the problem is even worse? That’s the implication of the bigger fine. But wait – that’s just the tip of the iceberg:

Citizens Advice, a charity that offers free financial and legal advice, said “failing to hit a single delivery target for nearly five years is simply unacceptable”.

So let’s get this straight:

Royal Mail was privatised more than a decade ago

in 2013, stopped hitting its targets for mail delivery around five or six years later, and has never managed to hit them again? Wouldn’t you say that this means privatisation has been an utter failure?

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The CWU – the union whose members comprise the Royal Mail workforce – would certainly seem to agree with that appraisal. Responding to claims by the firm’s owner (International Distribution Services (IDS)) that its poor performance is due to a challenging financial position and on strike action by the union, it answered that Royal Mail’s poor performance was due to a

“deliberate, sustained dismantling of UK postal services by a failed board and senior management team”

and also that the last strike was in 2022, so to partially blame missing delivery targets in 2023-24 on the CWU

“shows the lack of credibility and integrity”

of the board.

The message is clear: privatised Royal Mail is not providing the service expected of it and we have no reason to believe that normal service will be resumed while it is under private control.

It should be re-nationalised immediately.


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