UK Royal Mail tells MPs it will stamp out crime

Royal Mail said it prosecuted 300 of its staff last year for stealing from the post and other offences and has an 180-strong team dedicated to investigating crime in an effort by management to quash concerns about postal security.

Allan Leighton, chairman of the postal group, and Adam Crozier, chief executive, were yesterday grilled by MPs on various aspects of Royal Mail’s three-year turnaround plan, from post office closures to the scrapping of the second daily delivery. The executives told MPs that Royal Mail was reviewing its hiring policies and would cut its use of casual staff, who are not always properly vetted or trained.

In response to questions about a recent television documentary that showed negligence and theft among Royal Mail workers, Mr Crozier said the prosecutions had been for random individual acts, that the number of crimes was dropping and that no organised crime or regional pattern had been found.

Royal Mail is reviewing its security and recruitment policies, and Mr Crozier said the policy of checking the criminal records of staff with a cash-handling role might be extended to all workers.

He said the documentary “did not portray the majority of our staff. If you are going to employ 200,000 people some will not do their job as they are supposed to”.

Mr Leighton said Royal Mail would cut thousands of casual and temporary jobs. “The more full-time people we have the better but there will always be casual and temporary staff in some areas of the country,” he said. “We have to become better at managing them than anyone else.”

MPs also criticised Royal Mail’s management over the decline in the reliability of the postal service during the past year. The group is due to miss the regulator’s target of next-day deliveries for at least 92.5 per cent of first-class post.

Mr Crozier blamed wildcat strikes by postal workers late last year for the poor service and said that the post had been 93 per cent reliable before the industrial action. Royal Mail said about 90 per cent of first-class post is currently delivered the next day.

But Mr Crozier also admitted that the strain of introducing three sets of changes to Royal Mail procedures – in sorting, transport and deliveries – had also taken its toll on postal reliability. “We have clearly got some things wrong but we will fix them.”

He said that customers would start to see an improvement in the postal service in the next few months.

Mr Leighton added that the move to a single daily delivery of post was “the biggest change at any British industry in the last 25 years”, and that Royal Mail had not done a good enough job “of communicating what this would mean to customers”.