Royal Mail has been fined more than £10m by the postal regulator for missing delivery targets, including more than one. A quarter of first-class mail arriving late.
Ofcom, which fined the company £5.6m for the same failure of regulatory obligations last NovemberHe said the Royal Mail had taken “ineffective and ineffective steps” to improve performance this year.
Under the regulation; Royal Mail must deliver 93% of first-class mail within one working day of collection, and 98.5% of second-class mail within three working days of collection.
An Ofcom investigation found that in the year to the end of March the company only delivered 74.7% of first-class mail within the regulatory time frame, and 92.7% of second-class mail.
The company blamed its poor performance on its “challenging economy” and delays in its next business plan. a year of industrial work.
“Nor do we consider these to be just reasons for Royal Mail’s failure to provide the level of service expected of it,” Ofcom said.
“Finally, it is a society to manage its state in accordance with its obligations. “Royal Mail has taken inadequate and ineffective steps to try and prevent this failure, which is likely to impact millions of customers who have not received the service in return for payment.”
Ofcom said Royal Mail’s performance so far this year was “marginally better” and “doing much better”.
Distortion in delivery time will put further pressure on the focus of the company as a . a lot of takeovers are close to being completed.
Ofcom said the £10.5m penalty, which was eventually paid to the Treasury, could have been £15m but was reduced due to Royal Mail’s “admissions of liability and an agreement to settle the case”.
“With a million letters coming in late, too many are not getting what they pay for when they buy a character,” said Ian Strawthorner, director of enforcement at Ofcom.
“The Royal Mail’s poor service is now eroding public trust in one of the UK’s oldest institutions. We have seen some signs of progress, but it needs to go further and faster to deliver the service it expects.
A spokesman for Royal Mail said the company was “continuing to make substantial changes to make improvements” to email deliveries this year.
The Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) said the poor performance was “a direct result of the deliberate, disheartening behavior of the UK postal service by failed boards and senior management teams”.
Royal Mail to lobby Ofcom continues to work hard to reduce second-class letter deliveries to two or three days a week, cutting around 1,000 jobs and saving £300m a year in the process.
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He proposed reducing the daily Monday-to-Saturday second-class service to “every other week,” as mail delivery volumes plummeted in the digital age.
“Delivering a high quality of service is very important to us and we are making the necessary changes to deliver to our customers,” the spokesperson said. “It is necessary, however, that these efforts are supported by an urgent reform of the universal service, and by restoring it to a level that will meet the needs of today’s file users, not the needs of customers twenty years ago.”
In September, Ofcom said it would “assess” whether certain changes to second-class letter delivery would meet the needs of postal users ahead of a formal consultation due early next year.
The CWU said its members would agree to no service changes unless there were significant improvements in the company.
“We need to be very clear – there will be no agreement on these changes from the CWU unless we see quality restored and the conditions of our members improved,” said a union spokesman.
Last month, in the company of a parent Royal Mail He said he would consider job cuts and price rises in stamps and parts, as he criticized the Labor government’s first budget in 14 years for adding £120m to its costs.
In the end it came as Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský’s takeover bid for he made the Royal Mail near the end. The £3.57bn takeover by King Mail’s largest subsidiary, the EP Křetínský Group, was acquired by parent company IDS in May.
However, the sale of a formerly publicly owned service by a foreign buyer is scrutinized by the government under the National Securities and Investments Act.