Today I came home from a day trip to Perth to be greeted by 8 envelopes through my post box. While it’s nice to receive a Saturday delivery, it’s not nice that these letters were dated as far back as 7th August.
The letters I received were from two banks, two NHS health boards, Police Scotland and Lanarkshire Valuation Joint Board. Because of this delay, I was unaware of suspected fraud on one of my bank cards (thankfully not actual fraud) and a family member missed a medical appointment.
Delays like this are extra perverse when you consider that only the most important communications are sent by mail, with trivial matters arriving instantly by email and text message. So much of the legal and administrative state is predicated on the idea that if a letter is sent by Royal Mail, it is presumed to have been delivered within a short timeframe. Unfortunately at my home, and the homes of many of my constituents, mail is regularly taking more than three weeks to be delivered.
I wish I could say this was the first time this has happened at my home. But unfortunately, it’s been a repeated occurrence over at least the past year. Royal Mail have issued a number of press releases recently listing hundreds of postcode areas here, there and everywhere across the UK where you could expect temporary delays to your mail. I find these rather funny as Lanarkshire postcodes never seem to be listed. I can only take from this that the problem is much bigger than even the massive issue they are admitting. Coincidentally, it was reported in the press just yesterday that RM are failing to meet their targets on both first and second class mail. This is even after OFCOM reduced the target earlier this year and fined them for previous failures.
The UK Government broke up and privatised the components of the General Post Office through a series of moves beginning in 1969 and ending in 2011. While British Telecom (BT), Royal Mail and Parcelforce are now completely private, the Post Office continues to as a state-owned Limited company – although many individual branches are privately-owned franchises. These privatisations were taken forward by Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat governments.
Private companies need to make money, state-owned ones do not. Internationally, it is not normal for postal carriers to be profitable, that is why they tend to be government departments or state-owned corporations. Most governments recognise the value of a strong postal infrastructure benefits society in ways that are had to calculate financially. Even in ultra-capitalist America, the US Postal Service is a government agency and the US congress passes a budget item each year to cover their operating losses.
It is time that the UK Government acted to re-nationalise the communications industry. Communication infrastructure belongs in the hands of the people that use it, not a Czech billionaire.