Royal Mail fined £21m for late letter deliveries
Baku, October 15, AZERTAC
Royal Mail has been hit with a £21m fine after delivering almost one in four first-class letters late, according to the Telegraph.
Industry regulator Ofcom handed down the penalty – the largest ever for late deliveries – after the postal service fell short of its targets for both first and second-class post.
Under the Royal Mail Universal Service Obligation (USO), it is required to deliver 93pc of first-class letters within one working day of collection and 98.5pc of second-class letters within three working days.
However, in the year to the end of March, it delivered just 77pc of first-class mail and 92.5pc of second-class mail on time.
If Royal Mail misses its targets, Ofcom can consider evidence of any exceptional circumstance beyond the company’s control, such as extreme weather events, and whether it would have hit its targets had those events not occurred.
But the regulator found that even when accounting for two storms in December and January, Royal Mail still fell short of its targets.
As a result, Ofcom ruled that the company had failed to provide an acceptable level of service without justification. The watchdog said it had taken insufficient and ineffective steps to prevent this failure, which was likely to have affected millions of customers who did not receive the service they paid for.
Ian Strawhorne, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, said: “Millions of important letters are arriving late, and people aren’t getting what they pay for when they buy a stamp. These persistent failures are unacceptable, and customers expect and deserve better.
“Royal Mail must rebuild consumers’ confidence as a matter of urgency. And that means making actual significant improvements, not more empty promises.
“We’ve told the company to publicly outline how it will deliver this change, and we expect to see meaningful progress soon. If this doesn’t happen, fines are likely to continue.”
The £21m fine, which will be passed on to the Treasury, was initially set at £30m but was reduced by 30pc to reflect Royal Mail’s admission of liability and agreement to settle the case.
It follows a £10.5m fine last year and a £5.6m penalty in 2023, taking the total cost of Royal Mail’s poor service to more than £36m over the previous three years.
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