Sir Ashley Fox

I agree entirely with the right hon. Lady. I know that there are plenty of local problems, but I also want to look at the national picture. In the first quarter of this financial year, Royal Mail’s performance under the existing USO targets fell well short of expectations. The target for first-class deliveries is 93%, meaning that 93% of first-class post should arrive the next working day. In practice, Royal Mail managed only 75.9%. For second-class deliveries, the target is 98.5% delivered within three working days, yet only 89.3% were delivered on time. That is millions of items delayed across the country. When we look at daily deliveries, the story is even more concerning. In 2024-25, the proportion of daily routes that were delivered was 87.8%. That is against a target of 99.9%. On any given day, more than one in 10 routes were simply not delivered at all. That explains why locally, even within a small village, some people appear to get a good service while others get next to no post at all. A constituent in Spaxton wrote to me to let me know that his postie had complained of severe staffing shortages and that the new contracts being offered were making the jobs unattractive to new starters.