Month: May 2003

Royal Mail’s First Class service is at its most reliable for seven years.
Announcing quality of service results for the 02/03 financial year, the company said the performance of the First Class service improved cumulatively by nearly two per cent over the previous year. For the full year 2002/3 91.8 per cent of First Class letters were delivered next day compared with 89.9 per cent the year before. The licence issued by the regulator, Postcomm, sets a year-end target for the month of February and March. Performance in February and March was 91.7 per cent against a target of 92.5 per cent.

Royal Mail bosses today said their service was “not good enough” after a watchdog revealed more than a million first-class letters fail to arrive on time every day. New performance figures for the period April 2002 to March 2003 showed Royal Mail had not met 80% of its delivery targets. The group’s chief executive, Adam Crozier, told Channel 4 News: “We are improving and we are getting better. However, it is absolutely not good enough. “We have a number of plans in place to solve this – it’s very important for our business and social customers that we do – and I’m confident that we can and will improve.” Royal Mail missed almost twice as many performance targets as last year, meeting only three of 16 set for the period.