Royal Fail

Britain's postal service is in a mess. Sporadically the staff have been on strike for months - letters take weeks to travel a couple of miles. Last week's notice from my nearby dentist took ten days to arrive. 0.0025 miles per hour. Much post disappears for good; tonnes of mail languish in out-of-town silos because no-one can be found to deliver it. Theft is rife. Of the mail workers who do turn up to work one suspects a lot are only going there to pinch it.

And they don't deliver when you're at home. Once upon a time mail came in the morning - 7, maybe 8am just before father went to work. Now letters (ones they didn't lose, burn or steal) fit through the door just fine but parcels? No-one to sign for them. Now it's anytime between 10am and 6pm and everybody who can afford a parcel is out at work. Useless. Parcels go back to the depot. Often they never left in the first place - in many areas the postman will sneak a "we called but you were out..." card through the door and shamble off without even bothering to bring the parcel with him. Try lying in wait for one and you'll see what I mean. Instead you collect it from the sorting office the next morning and cart the damn thing around work all day.

I'm sure some postmen are very good, consciencious people. But if you're a state-owned utility with crap pay, bad conditions, hostile labour relations and decades of underinvestment... well, then you just ain't gonna attract the cream of the crop. And just like any bad environment the best ones quit first.





The General Post Office was a remarkable innovation. The Victorians weren't the first generation to write letters (writing appeared, ooh, several thousand years before) but they were they were the first to conceive a network of dirt-cheap, universal communication. In 1840 it cost a few pennies to communicate with anyone else in the country, a few more and you could get all the way around the empire.

The General Post Office was quick, too. Thanks to a burgeoning railway network the penny letter you posted one evening would be at the other end of the country by dawn. Very Thirty-Nine Steps.

It doesn't work that way anymore. Telecommunications (in Britain mostly part of the GPO but spun out by an asset-stripping government in the 80's) have made letters irrelevant. Your packet of information can travel from Land's End to John o' Groats in a millisecond and you don't even need to stick the queen's head on it. Money goes down the wires too. And even NetGear's naffest router won't cash the cheques and chuck your bills in the canal.

So what are the Royal Mail for?





Three things. Letters, parcels and as a general repository of government-things-that-didn't-fit-elsewhere[*]. Passport applications, driving licenses, that kind of thing. But we've seen competition in the parcels market for ages (UPS, DHL, CityLink off the top of my head), license applications are all just forms (html, <form/> geddit?) and the letters... well, just why?


Today I got an email from my lawyer. A contract, all signed and approved and scanned and pdf-ed. Another from my accountant. Later my gas bill (negative, evidently my flat produces gas). If even accountants and lawyers and the gas company are electronic - the most conservative, luddite professions in existence - what are letters for?

The only people still sending letters are junk advertisers and the state. The former have no choice to reach high-value demographics (we all have good spam filters, right?) and the other... well, it's just big too old and slow to change. And even supertankers like Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs will turn around if you push them hard enough.

We don't need letters anymore and the private sector can compete for the parcels. Sooner or later some bright spark will even realise they can charge an extra tenner to deliver the parcels when we're actually at home.

Anachronistic, pointless and getting in the way. It's time we scrapped the Royal Fail.

[*] For the sake of correctness - your local Post Office is no longer operated by the Royal Mail. This also was spun out into a separate business a few years back; the Post Office is essentially now a chain of concession stands and very tatty corner shops.