UK Royal Mail warns targets will not be met as letter reliability falls

Royal Mail has warned that year-end service quality targets were unlikely to be achieved following industrial action during the Autumn. Letter reliability in the third quarter of the financial year – from October to December – fell from the record levels achieved earlier in 2003.

Chief Executive Adam Crozier said: “Our customers have suffered as a result of the industrial action in some parts of the UK in the Autumn and I greatly regret that. But since then we have made a major step forward, gaining the backing of our postmen and women for a new deal on pay and change in the company worth 14.5 per cent over 18 months.”

But Mr Crozier made clear that customers would continue to see some impact on quality of service due to the implementation of changes to the network.

“The pay agreement we’ve reached with our people is a vital foundation stone for going forward to complete our recovery plan. We can now get on with things. However the implementation of changes has been delayed so we are now catching up, working at a faster pace to a more demanding timescale.

“Our people are doing an outstanding job putting changes in place. But the unprecedented pace of change within Royal Mail’s network makes sustaining high levels of customer service more challenging.

“In January we made the single biggest change we’ve ever made to our transport and distribution networks. We’re also changing delivery patterns in our 1,500 local offices. This means we won’t get services back to normal as quickly as we would normally after last year’s disruption. We expect this to have some impact on the final quarter’s figures. I apologise to our customers if their services don’t hit targets while we complete these changes.

“But we don’t make changes lightly and the truth is that change is necessary to put us in a position where we can consistently meet – and exceed – our regulatory targets. That will be a significant improvement for customers and that’s what I’m committed to.”

Royal Mail has today published letter reliability results for the third quarter (October – December) which show that quality of service for First Class mail fell to 84.9 per cent during the period, much of the fall due to the widespread effect of strikes which disrupted mail right across the country even though the majority of postmen and women continued to work normally. This reduced cumulative performance to 90.3 per cent, against a target of 92.5 per cent. Cumulative performance for Second Class mail fell by one per cent to 97.6 per cent, against its target of 98.5 per cent.

In the first half of the year (April- September) Royal Mail’s First Class service showed its strongest ever performance, reaching 92.7 per cent, with Second Class mail at 98.7 per cent, both ahead of targets.