John Milne

Royal Mail is a British heritage icon. Bright red post boxes crop up in millions of photographs taken by tourists every year, but what residents describe to me is far short of a postcard picture. This debate is starting to feel like a mass therapy session in which we all share our stories. I thought it was just me, but no, it is absolutely everyone. Like others, I respect the incredible hard work of the posties and Royal Mail workers in my patch. I have visited the delivery centre in Horsham, and I have seen them at work. It is a hive of activity, and no one is standing still. Despite their energy, like many hon. Members, I have received messages from Royal Mail workers themselves who are distraught that the service they offer is being undermined by factors beyond their control. Royal Mail wrote to me this month confirming that deliveries in Horsham had been affected by sickness absence and resourcing, that some letter deliveries had been rotated and that it is recruiting for nine vacant posts. It also told me that mail is being taken out six days a week, regular as clockwork. Unfortunately, that simply does not fit the lived experience of residents. They describe post arriving late, all at once or not at all. Yet as recently as August, I understood that the office’s own statistics showed deliveries running satisfactorily and that staffing was adequate. My constituents are living somewhere in the space between these two very contradictory pictures. One constituent has written to me about going without post, sometimes for more than a month. Her son is medically vulnerable, and she has missed appointments, as have so many others we have heard about tonight. She asks a fair question: why can parcels be prioritised almost instantly, yet not letters? Meanwhile, Roundabout Talking News posts out to its users every Friday morning in bags marked “For The Blind”, but a volunteer told me that she has to visit the sorting office roughly once a month simply to sort out the problems with delivery. Royal Mail tells me it has introduced an NHS-specific barcode at no extra charge to protect NHS letters in times of disruption, but it cannot tell me how many NHS bodies in Horsham use it, because each buys its postal services separately. A safeguard that nobody can measure is not a solution, and it simply wastes valuable clinician time. We have a service designed for a pre-internet, pre-email world, and it must adapt, but it must have support in doing so. Royal Mail’s own unions point out that, unlike other European countries, the UK does not subsidise the universal service. The regulator Ofcom now proposes to hold the second-class mail price cap for a further year. So I ask the Minister an honest question: does she think it is possible to run a universal service without any kind of Government support? In my previous career I worked in advertising in Ireland, and the Irish Post Office, An Post, was one of my big clients. It was plain then, 20 years ago, where we were headed, and it is where we have arrived today. There is a fundamental challenge to the business model, and we have not yet solved it. I thought the words of the right hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) were very interesting on the various options that have been considered. That is the conversation we need to have, because the way we are going is not working. It feels as though we are seeing managed decline, and not very well managed at that. This is serving no one—not the residents, not the posties. Either we say we care enough to help this service, or we finally admit that we do not.