Tag: Royal Mail

Royal Mail must deliver or die, as it faces serious competition for the first time. From tomorrow, the European postal services directive will reduce the part of the postal market that can be reserved to national monopoly operators.

Royal Mail faces multi-million-pound fines unless it dramatically improves two business mail services, it emerged yesterday. The industry regulator Postcomm placed an enforcement order on Royal Mail, requiring it to improve the two services by the end of March or face a fine of around pounds 8m.

Royal Mail Group has called for greater flexibility to increase postage stamp prices after warning that it may face extra costs of at least Pounds 1bn over the next three years. Postcomm, the postal regulator, has already agreed to a 1p increase in the price of first class and second class stamps from April to help stem Royal Mail’s Pounds 1.1m-a-day losses, as long as average prices are then frozen until 2006. But Royal Mail claims this could be swamped by a potential Pounds 330m black hole in its pension funds and a further Pounds 280m to cover possible rises in interest payments on government loans.