UK Royal Mail is failing to deliver for small firms
The Royal Mail never had to deliver its next day first-class letter service before midday. It just did. But small businesses have come to rely on invoices, legal documents and customer promotions arriving in the morning as part of the smooth running.
The fuss over the abolition of the second post is a nonsense for most firms as for them the service ceased years ago. Only 4pc of all the daily post was being delivered in this way before Royal Mail acted. What is more galling for small businesses is the apparent abolition of the morning post and, in some cases, daily post altogether.
The Royal Mail insists any disruption is temporary and it aims to have all business mail delivered by 9.30am – prioritising it ahead of residential mail. The disruption, it says, has been caused by changes to the local delivery routes, designed to ensure that dropping the remains of the second post, which represented 20pc of its delivery costs, pays dividends.
There is also the broader cost-cutting programme, which the Royal Mail hopes will save pounds 350m a year. As part of this exercise, a third of its 9,000 urban post offices are being closed down – for the time being, the Government has decided the taxpayer will pay to stop any more rural post offices from the chop.
But as Channel 4's recent documentary highlighted, the disruption to the daily service goes beyond mere temporary restructuring. The programme showed widespread fraud, theft and incompetence at London sorting offices.
Last week's report by the watchdog Postwatch reinforced the impression, showing that more than half the population had received wrongly delivered mail in the past six months. A spokeswoman said almost 4,000 "seriously cross" businesses had complained about the poor service in the last year.
Postcomm, the industry regulator, is widely expected to hand the Royal Mail a pounds 50m fine later this month because of the poor delivery performance. It is meant to ensure that it delivers at least 92.5pc of all letters on time, but in the first nine months of the year had only achieved 90.3pc. Postwatch says that while the changes to the postal service have been "more problematic than anyone thought", it believes that "in the end it will work". In the meantime, small businesses will have to assess their options.
Paul Hutson, manager of Arrow Cycles in North Hykeham, near Lincoln, has had his post delivered as late as 2pm for some time, even though the shop he manages for owners Ted and Carole Thompson is adjacent to the local post office.
"The problem for me is my admin team comes in at 9.45 to open all the letters and the invoices. But they can't deal with it until the next morning.
"Sometimes it's not a problem. But when our suppliers send products to us some of them send the invoice in the post. We can't open the package until we see the invoices. There's no point in putting it on the shelf as there's no way of knowing that we've got what we ordered."
Mr Hutson said in the last two weeks letter deliveries had begun to arrive in the morning again, but only after he had aired his concerns in a local newspaper.
Another business that felt it had no option but to complain was two-year-old adventure holiday business Outlook Expeditions, based in Bethseda, near Bangor. It found that not only was its normal post being disrupted, but an expensive nationwide promotional mailing had not been delivered properly.
"To start with, it was a joke," said director Rhys Davies. "Following up leads by phone we discovered that about half our letters never arrived. Potentially, it could have cost our business anything up to pounds 150,000."
Mr Davies added: "Parents trust us with their teenage children, so anything that affects our business operations affects our reputation too. It's made us look unprofessional and unreliable, which in this line of business is totally unacceptable."
After being unable to get any joy out of Royal Mail, Mr Davies contacted Postwatch to ask the watchdog to take up the problem. In the meantime, Mr Davies said he was now sending anything important by special delivery.
Graham Ellis, the managing director of Hampshire-based Ellis Transport Services and Transport Stationery Services, said last week that his mail had begun appearing at 4pm. "The banks are closed and the cheques are sitting there and we lose a day's interest," he said.
He added that for most mailings he now turned to alternative suppliers, like Business Post for parcels.
Business Post's business letter subsidiary UK Mail has just secured a licence to compete with Royal Mail for the delivery of business letters.
But it will only target those firms sending out more than 4,000 letters in one go. Similar services are to be provided by the likes of Hays, Express Dairies and Deutsche Post, but again they are not expected to focus on servicing small businesses.
The unreliability of the post has forced Mr Ellis to look at alternative ways to communicate with his customers and suppliers. "We are now saying `Do you have an e-mail and can you e-mail invoices to us'. It's pushing us more and more down the electronic route. I've just ordered new computers," he said.
