Are the days of Britain’s universal post numbered?

THE Government is resisting Royal Mail’s request to stop Saturday deliveries. Other countries have reduced postal services with little impact on consumers, but with significant environmental benefits. I’d also back streamlining the service offered by doing away with second-class post. The work of separating second-class letters would be much better spent in simply delivering on receipt.

PAUL GARROD, Portsmouth, Hants.

LIVING in the Scottish Highlands, I have to pay excess delivery charges on goods being sent from elsewhere in the UK, including from other parts of Scotland. Who should have to pay the extra costs businesses incur to get my shopping delivered to me? Adding several hours’ worth of staff wages, a couple of hundred miles’ worth of fuel costs and wear and tear on vehicles is the price businesses have to pay for delivering to people in the Highlands. Add the costs and time of getting across to the islands and I wonder how we expect it all to be paid for. One option is for all customers’ delivery costs to be increased, regardless of whether they live a few miles down the motorway from the retailer or hundreds of miles away along a single carriageway and across the water on a boat. One section of the country subsidising another just because of where they choose to live is simply unfair.

Another option is for Scotland to grow its own economy so we are less reliant on goods from elsewhere. But that would require the Scottish government to rethink its economic strategy, including taxation, and that is clearly beyond its capability or political will.

DENISE FARRELL, Nairn, Highland.

IT’S time for the Royal Mail to be renamed. The ‘service’ is in such a dire state it must be embarrassing for the King to be associated with it.

CLIVE WHICHELOW, London SW19.