Nine out of ten first class letters arrive next day says Royal Mail

First Class service improves year-on-year, but more work still needed

More than nine out of ten First Class letters are arriving the day after posting for the second three months in succession. Royal Mail is delivering a substantially better performance compared to a year ago but still has work to do in under-performing parts of the country if the year end target of 92.1% is to be met, Consignia said today.

The latest quality of service report covering the final three months of 2001 showed that 90.4% of First Class letters arrived the day after posting. This was a 0.3 percentage point below the quarterly performance for July to September – but it is much better than the 87.0% result in the October to December period in 2000.

First Class performance has now been running between 90.0% and 91.1% since July 2001.

Second class performance for the same three months was 98.4 just short of the year's 98.5% target.

The substantial improvement in First Class performance over the same period last year is due to a more stable – but still under performing – rail network, and the virtual elimination of strikes following new agreements put in place after Lord Sawyer's recent report on industrial relations in Royal Mail.

Service was also disrupted during October and November by scores of separate security alerts resulting from the threat of bio-chemical attack, all of which turned out to be harmless, but which nevertheless caused delays when employees have to be evacuated from mail centres and delivery offices. Commenting on the results, Consignia's Chief Executive, John Roberts, said. "Not bad…. but still not good enough.

"90% or more is pretty respectable in the areas where it is achieved. Royal Mail employees are making a huge effort to drive performance even higher – and in almost a third of the UK we are already beating our target. But in 40% of the country, we are not even hitting 90% and it is in these areas where everyone in the business must make renewed efforts, and where changes to our delivery pattern will make the greatest difference to customers.

"We're making radical changes to delivery patterns to make sure that Royal Mail turns the current mixed performance into a consistent, above target service, for all parts of the UK.

"A single delivery, six days a week, will help us deliver more First Class letters the day after posting – it makes better use of our people and fits with our licence conditions. We are embarking on the pilot schemes which will help us plan the detail of changes," said Mr Roberts.

Royal Mail will be consulting widely with customers, employees and with consumer watchdog Postwatch and the regulator, Postcomm, about the changes, which are being piloted in 14 delivery offices across the UK.

Record Christmas

Commenting on Christmas performance, Mr Roberts said "We dealt with the UK's biggest ever Christmas mailbag with 2.1 billion letters overall – some 50 million more than the previous year. And service quality was again significantly better than last year."

The quality of service targets set by the regulator do not include the hectic pre-Christmas period as the huge increases in mail volumes in December inevitably put a strain on the normal operation.

During the pre-Christmas period, 64.9% of First Class letters and cards arrived the day after posting – nearly 15 percentage points better than the performance in the same period 12 months earlier. The Second Class performance pre-Christmas was 93.6 which was also an increase on the result 12 months earlier of 87.7% The guaranteed Royal Mail Special Delivery service, however, held up well during pre-Christmas with a 97.3% performance, comparable to or better than many courier services which are considerably more expensive.

http://www.consignia.com/