Dear reader, long gone are the days when we wrote letters and postcards to our friends and family from afar. Since advent of the internet and the boom of social messaging apps, snail mail simply isn’t in vogue anymore. And now, Royal Mail is hoping to stop Saturday letter deliveries altogether in order to cut losses and restructure its business.
People are giving in to the quick gratification of instant messaging at the expense of paper posts, and the data says it all. Royal Mail reported that paper post has fallen from its peak at 20 billion annually in 2004/2005 to just seven billion in 2022/2023. That’s a whopping 60 per cent dive!
Although nothing is set in stone just yet, Ofcom is now beginning a process to establish how weekend services ‘might need to evolve to better reflect the changing needs of postal users’. There’s simply not enough demand for letter deliveries, with the regulator estimating that Royal Mail could save £225m a year by cutting the weekend service.
The Universal Service Obligation (USO) sets out that Royal Mail must provide a six-day-a-week, one-price-goes-anywhere postal service to the 32 million UK addresses. However, Royal Mail has stated that the USO is ‘outdated and in need of urgent reform’, especially when ‘consumer demand for postal services has changed substantially, and continues to do so’.
A spokesperson from Royal Mail said: ‘We welcome that Ofcom is looking at options for the future of the USO and the recognition that it needs to evolve to reflect the changing needs of postal users. Being required to provide a service that customers have said they no longer need, at a significant cost to Royal Mail, increases the threat to the sustainability of the USO.
‘We want to work with all stakeholders, including Ofcom, government, our unions and our customers to enable change quickly and to protect the long-term sustainability of the one-price-goes-anywhere universal service.’
Did you see that this iconic English cathedral’s 40-year makeover is finally complete?
Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out UK newsletter for the latest UK news and the best stuff happening across the country.