Email 3 days a week? Idea meets resistance in Britain

Britain's postal service could consider cutting deliveries to five days a week, or even three, from six, the country's regulator said on Wednesday, sparking resistance from lawmakers and businesses.

The Royal Mail, like the US Postal Service, is increasingly plagued by service problems and financial pressure. Given the rising costs, the organization is in danger of becoming “financially and operationally unsustainable in the long term”. This is evident from a report by Ofcom, the British communications regulator.

Cutting deliveries to just three days a week could save the Royal Mail up to 650 million pounds ($830 million) a year, the report found. Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Belgium have reduced the frequency of letter delivery or extended delivery times in recent years, Ofcom said.

However, lawmakers have pushed back on this idea. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose Conservatives have the majority, said on Wednesday he remains “absolutely committed” to ensuring Royal Mail delivers six days a week. The service, which was privatized in 2013, is legally required to deliver mail six days a week, so any change would require a vote in parliament.

Scottish National Party MP Richard Thomson said he was against cutting Royal Mail delivery days because many people, especially those in rural areas, relied on the postal service to transport documents and deliver parcels in a reliable, cheap way.

“What is being proposed would strike at the very core of that premise,” Mr Thomson said. He added that privatization had seen Royal Mail put more emphasis on customer service.

The number of letters in Britain has halved since 2011, with more people sending emails and text messages instead of handwritten notes. But the post office is still part of British life. Its history goes back more than 500 years, when Henry VIII commissioned his secretary to set up a national postal network to carry his mail and that of the Tudor court. Charles I the postal service opened to the public in 1635.

Other services in Britain are also facing tight budgets. Continued cuts to the National Health Service, a symbol of the British welfare state, have left the service underfunded and understaffed. After more than a decade of low economic growth and wage stagnation, three-quarters of people in Britain said they believed the country was becoming a worse place to live, up from 49 percent of people in 2011 who said things were got worse, according to an Ipsos poll.

Dave Ward, the general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, which represents postal workers, said in a statement on Wednesday that reducing deliveries to just three days a week would destroy the Royal Mail as customers know it and affect thousands of jobs. The proposal was “dead in the water,” he said.

Tina McKenzie, policy chair of the Federation of Small Businesses, which represents small businesses and the self-employed, said a quarter of small businesses depend on the postal service and that cutting services would disrupt the economy.

Ofcom, the regulator, said the number of delivery days would be reduced without lowering delivery targets, but gave no details of how that would work. Under the new guidelines, a next-day service would still be available for urgent letters.

The Royal Mail, which posted an operating loss of 419 million British pounds ($533 million) on an adjusted basis last year, said it expected to deliver four billion letters a year within five years, up from 20 billion letters almost two decades ago.

Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office, a separate organization from Royal Mail, said in a statement on Wednesday that he agreed there should be a debate about how the postal service should be modernised. Still, vulnerable people, the elderly and businesses depend on reliable letter services, he said, and “any review must take their needs into account.”

In a poll for Ofcom, 79 percent of people said some things should always be sent by post. Saturday deliveries were important to 58 percent of people, up from 63 percent in 2020, according to the survey of more than 2,000 British adults in October and November. (The US Postal Service only delivers priority mail and Amazon packages on Sundays.)

The British Post Office has also been in the spotlight in recent weeks due to a years-long scandal in which hundreds of people in charge of post offices were wrongly accused of theft. An ITV series, “Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office,” which aired on January 1, dramatized the fate of postal workers who were prosecuted in court between 1999 and 2015 for financial losses that never occurred.