Ofcom is conspiring in the rapid death of the post
People nowadays send fewer letters. Therefore, thinks Royal Mail, they should have fewer deliveries. Ending Saturday deliveries is one of its bright ideas. I find it puzzling that these attempts to wind down the postal service are being uncritically supported by the regulator, Ofcom.
Ofcom’s chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, says “the universal service… is getting out of date and will become unsustainable if we don’t take action”. It would be more up-to-date, she seems to think, if letters arrived even more rarely than they already do. She floats the idea of only three deliveries a week, citing Royal Mail’s calculation that this would save £400-650 million a year. By her logic, why not cut out all letter deliveries? I bet that would save a lot more.
The “principal duty” of the regulator (who, in Dame Melanie’s case, earns twice as much as the Prime Minister) is – I quote Ofcom’s own words – to “further the interests of citizens and consumers”. Royal Mail is under what is called the “universal service obligation” which requires six-day deliveries and a single price to all UK destinations. In the past, under the chairmanship of Dame Patricia Hodgson, Ofcom defended this obligation, blocking an attempt to ditch Saturdays.
It is only because of the concept of universal service, in its wider sense, that the Royal Mail has any right to exist and any need for a regulator. Instead of pushing Royal Mail management’s line, why does Dame Melanie not ask it some hard questions?
Look at price. Ofcom’s own poll of users shows they put “affordability” top (at 91 per cent) of all their requirements. In 2012, the Post Office and Royal Mail were split. At that time, the price of a first-class stamp rose from 46p to 60p, the biggest increase for 37 years. In recent times, it has risen sharply again. A first-class letter in 2024 costs £1.25. So while general inflation over that 12-year period has been under 40 per cent, stamp inflation has been about 250 per cent. Inevitably, far fewer letters are sent. It is one of the rare cases in history where people must pay much more than before for a service which will move slower than ever.
An expensive and declining service must drive customers away. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Royal Mail has a vested interest in the decline of the standard of service: customers give up on it and therefore ministers cease to care about protecting their rights.
A better regulator would be sharper with the firm about its work practices and its lack of innovation. Royal Mail has never succeeded in tackling its rigid trade unions and getting them to modernise. Nowadays, it trumpets its profits from its seven-days-a-week parcel deliveries. Why doesn’t Dame Melanie ask it to look for Saturday synergy between its now successful parcels and loss-making letters?
MPS are under pressure to change
the one-word ratings used by Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. The sad suicide last year of the Reading primary school head Ruth Perry dramatises this issue. Mrs Perry’s previously successful school, to which she was so devoted, was suddenly rated “inadequate”. She could not bear it.
There is a real problem here, but not quite as identified. It surely is useful to be able to categorise schools officially. There has to be a clear way of differentiating between what is outstanding, what is ordinary and what is simply not good enough. There is always a lobby in the education system which wishes to blur such distinctions (a similar argument goes on about exam grades), but it should be resisted.
One word, however, is over-used, wrongly applied and too loaded with accusation. It is the word “safeguarding”. Such is its unique power within officialdom that, if a school is rated “inadequate” in safeguarding, it is automatically rated inadequate overall. That is what happened to Mrs Perry’s school.
In the public mind, “safeguarding” failure means something very close to covering up child sexual abuse. It is therefore a reputation-destroying word.
In reality, the word is used by inspectors to cover a multitude of sins, some extremely grave and some which hardly seem like sins at all. In the case of Mrs Perry’s school, the issue was one of record keeping, not of any iniquity.
Official deployment of the word “safeguarding” can be used to attack a school which, sometimes for ideological reasons (a prejudice against church schools is an example), inspectors resent. It is that single word, not the whole notion of school ratings, whose meaning needs to be unpacked and more tightly defined.
At the weekend, we went to see
One Life, the film about Nicholas Winton, who led the rescue of nearly 700 Jewish child refugees as the Nazis menaced Prague in 1939. It is a straightforward, powerful film about a good deed in a very bad world, and an education to those born in this century who have been taught that Jews are Nazis and Hamas is a welfare organisation. Artistically, however, the film’s greatest achievement is the portrait of old age, painted by Anthony Hopkins as Winton in his mid-70s. Often, at that time of life, people are haunted by something they feel they did wrong. In some curious sense, Winton is haunted by what he did right. He has hidden it all away.
When others discover what he did, nearly 50 years on, his spirit is liberated. This true story is touching.
It is one of the rare cases in history where people must pay much more than before for a slower service