Royal Mail delivery results

The Royal Mail is delivering more first class letters on time but admitted that improvements were too slow, new figures show today.

More than nine out of ten first class letters arrived a day after being posted between July and September, a 1% improvement on the same period a year ago.

Second class mail performance was 98.6%.

The first class figure of 91.5% was still 1% behind the Royal Mail’s target for the end of the current financial year.

Jerry Cope, the Royal Mail’s managing director, said: “The results are going in the right direction but too slowly and without enough consistency across all services and all parts of the UK.”

The new figures showed that first class mail reliability in London was 90.1%, up from 85.7% a year ago.

Mr Cope said the gap between reliability in the capital and the rest of the country had been cut from 5% to less than 2% in a year but he admitted that some postcode areas in London had seen little improvement.

Action plans had been set up for those areas, he announced.

Postal watchdog Postwatch said the figures could not disguise the fact that a quarter of all postcodes, many in densely populated urban areas, were receiving a sub-standard service.

“It is not almost impossible for Royal Mail to meet the target imposed in its licence for a minimum delivery standard across all postcode areas for the entire year,” said chairman Peter Carr.

He called on the industry’s regulator to act against this “potential breach” of the Royal Mail’s licence.