This week I have considered it necessary to write directly to the regulator Ofcom to express the growing dissatisfaction of the scale of problems people in Crawley are facing with receiving postal deliveries. This won’t feel like a new problem for many, I know, but this goes well beyond something that can continue to be tolerated.
I want to make clear that I admire the work our postal workers do, rain or shine, but someone in Royal Mail’s most senior management is letting them down and doing the unforgivable: damaging the public’s perception of this service, which we and our forebears have relied on for hundreds of years.
The national media reports letters sitting in depots for weeks and rounds being missed daily.
Some of the time delays for deliveries residents have informed me about are ridiculous, to the point hospital appointments for many weeks ahead are being missed because the letter isn’t received in time.
The Royal Mail itself has confirmed delivery delays across dozens of UK postcodes, reporting persistent issues related to sickness, resourcing and operational pressures. These issues are mirrored locally. But worryingly, Crawley was not included within that list of postcodes. It should have been.
Earlier this year, the council had its own deliveries by the Royal Mail on a high profile issue beset by claims they were not being done and they couldn’t demonstrate otherwise to us.
A reliable postal service is essential for residents, businesses, public services and democratic engagement. The current level of performance in Crawley is unacceptable, and national evidence confirms this is part of a wider pattern of regulatory concern and declining service quality.
We need public services to be precisely that. Chasing the parcel business can’t be at the expense of the mail side – and too often unofficially postal deliverers are telling people that is what they are getting the pressure on because it is more closely monitored.
We can’t bury our heads in the sand. If there is a problem, we were elected to get the public services sorted again after the Tories running them into the ground, I consider this a key one to resolve. If that requires the reversal of the privatisation of Royal Mail undertaken by the Tories and Lib Dem coalition back in 2013 to fix the problem, I think most people would support that.
Ofcom says it has fined Royal Mail £37m in recent years for its poor letter delivery performance and ‘will continue to hold the company to account’. The time for patience is over, I urge Ofcom to intervene here in Crawley, to resolve the crisis of performance in one of our most vital public services.
Ironically, I have had to send the letter to Ofcom by post because the regulator for the communications industry apparently only takes postal correspondence, there is no email address. I can only hope they receive it in the near future, given the problems!
Cllr Michael Jones
Leader, Crawley Borough Council