Postcomm launch Royal Mail probe
The mail regulator has announced that is to investigate “serious service quality failings” at the Royal Mail.
The investigation follows the revelation that Royal Mail has missed all of its annual service quality targets, at the same time as announcing a £220 million pre-tax profit.
This is the company’s first profit for four years.
Chairman of Postcomm, Nigel Stapleton, said: “While it is pleasing to see Royal Mail’s improved financial results, it is essential that these should not have been achieved by any loss of focus on customer service quality.
“Postcomm will be taking action to satisfy itself that all reasonable endeavours were made to meet the required service standards, and continue to be made. If we consider it justified, we will not hesitate to impose financial penalties.
“Last year Postcomm fined Royal Mail a record £7.5 million following far less extensive service failures in 2002/03.”
The results of their investigation will be announced in September after considering representations from Royal Mail and Postwatch.
Peter Carr, chairman of Postwatch, the consumers’ representatives, said: “We are pleased that the Royal Mail has returned to profit. It would have been far worse if the company had made a loss as well as failing its customers.
“These profits must now be invested to improve the service results.”
Mr Carr said he expected the regulator to take action and added: “We want achievement of delivery standards to be hard wired by the licence to Board and Senior Managers’ bonuses.
“This performance is part of a 3 year decline in service and cannot be waived away as the fault of the unofficial industrial action in and around London in November.”
Royal Mail has however defended its performance, blaming unofficial strike action for the missing of targets.
It emphasised that service standards in many areas were only just shy, for example Second Class mail was 97.8 per cent against a target of 98.5 per cent.
Chief Executive Adam Crozier said: “I accept that our quality of service has not been good enough. Every letter is important to us and we are urgently working to improve our quality of service for customers.”
However, he argued that: “Prior to the strikes many services were demonstrating a stronger level of performance than ever before, and I am confident that once the major changes have been fully implemented customers will see quality improve.
“Our top priority at the moment is to address the issues that have caused service quality in some places to drop because of teething problems with our operational changes.
These operational changes have included moving to single day delivery and changing mail delivery systems.
There have also been significant job cuts.
