Charlie Maynard

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg, and I thank the hon. Member for Exmouth and Exeter East (David Reed) for securing this important debate. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Sutton and Cheam (Luke Taylor), for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) and for Yeovil (Adam Dance) for highlighting all the impacts on their constituents, in the form of missed medical appointments, financial appointments or legal appointments. Exactly the same is true in my Witney constituency. Obviously, I speak for the whole Chamber; we are all getting correspondence about this issue in our mailbox, because it is causing so much trouble. The other thing that has come out so strongly in this debate is the stress, the distrust and the unfairness that the posties themselves have to live with. That situation causes a huge amount of unhappiness, but there seems to be no end to it in sight, which is a real problem. The turnover rate of new Royal Mail employees is extremely high and the work practices are harsh. Yet we rely on our local posties, and almost without exception they take their responsibilities extremely seriously. I will give a particular shout out to my postie, Tony, who on Christmas eve worked way beyond his scheduled hours. He should not have had to do that and should have been paid for it. However, he is representative of everybody working for Royal Mail around the country, and that situation does not just happen on Christmas eve; it happens week in, week out. The work practices are just getting tougher and tougher. That comes out in the latest quarterly report, which makes for miserable reading. For example, delivery targets were not met in a single postcode across the first three quarters of 2025-26. In Oxfordshire, just 67.2% of first-class mail arrived, against the target of 93%. In October 2025, Ofcom fined Royal Mail £21 million, saying that it urgently needed an improvement plan. However, five months later Royal Mail is still saying that it cannot publish that plan until talks with the postal workers union—the CWU—conclude. All the while, our constituents and our posties are left paying more and suffering more for an inadequate and wholly unreliable service.