A Woodingdean home had no post from 1 to 16 August, then 29 items at once, Chris Ward MP told a Royal Mail debate. He wants more powers for the regulator.
A household in Woodingdean received no post at all from 1 to 16 August, then 29 items in one go on 17 August, then nothing again until 13 items arrived on 29 August. Chris Ward, the MP for Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven, read those dates out in a Westminster Hall debate on Royal Mail’s performance on Wednesday 21 October.
When he took the case to Royal Mail locally, he told MPs, the reply was: “there are no current issues with the delivery of mail to your constituent’s address…deliveries are taking place six days a week.”
“Frankly, it is hard to know how to relay that to constituents,” he said, according to the Hansard record of the debate.
The most common complaint in his inbox
The debate was secured by Sorcha Eastwood, the MP for Lagan Valley. Mr Ward opened by thanking Royal Mail staff, “particularly those I met on Monday at the delivery office in Rottingdean”, where he had taken residents’ complaints to managers two days earlier.
Royal Mail, he said, “is a truly national service and a source of good, unionised jobs”, and other firms in the sector should be pushed to match its employment standards. But “right now problems with Royal Mail is the one issue I get the most emails about. I was going to say letters, but it is actually emails.”
Constituents were now “routinely missing letters”, he said, “letters informing them of NHS appointments, legal affairs, fines and so on.” One man had contacted him the previous Saturday to say his Labour party conference pass had arrived about four weeks late.
“A cycle of despair”
His central argument was that the usual response to late post does not work. “We are now in a cycle of despair with Royal Mail,” he told the debate, “where constituents report unacceptable delays all the time and MPs from across the House come here to raise them. Successive Governments will say how terrible it all is and demand that Ofcom acts and Royal Mail improves, but Ofcom does not have the powers it needs and keeps fining Royal Mail for failure, despite the fact that Royal Mail cannot make a profit anyway.”
Royal Mail, he said, “has no chance of hitting its legally mandated targets and no hope of competing on a level playing field, because operators in the same sector simply do not have the same regulatory or employment standards that we ask of Royal Mail.”
He asked the minister to “level the playing field for Royal Mail, empower the regulator more, and give Royal Mail staff the opportunity they need to improve and modernise the service”, adding that there was “a majority for it and cross-party support” in this Parliament.
In a statement after the debate, Mr Ward said:
“Royal Mail is a national institution and a service we all rely on. We should be proud of the universal postal service and the hard-working staff who deliver it.
“However, complaints about delivery delays are among the most common issues raised with me. When people are missing NHS appointments, legal correspondence or other important letters, it is simply not good enough.
“We have to break this cycle of residents reporting problems, MPs raising concerns and little changing. We need to look at how we can better support Royal Mail and ensure the regulator has the powers it needs and create a fairer playing field across the postal sector.
“Royal Mail needs a fighting chance to succeed, and its staff deserve the opportunity to deliver the service they want to provide, and our constituents rightly expect.”
What the minister said
Replying for the Government, Kate Dearden, the Minister for the Future of Work, said Royal Mail “is an independent business, and the Government are not involved in its day-to-day operations or resolving specific service issues, but patience with its performance is wearing thin.” She said she had been “frank” with Royal Mail’s chief executive at a meeting last month and that “the pace of improvement must increase quickly”. She also told MPs that letter volumes had fallen from 20 billion items a year in the mid-2000s to 6.5 billion in 2025, while the number of addresses served had kept growing.
Mr Ward’s speech can be watched below.
What it means for you
Nothing in the debate changes deliveries on your street yet: it was MPs putting cases to the minister, not a change to Royal Mail’s service or to Ofcom’s powers. If your post arrives in bursts after long gaps, as it did in Woodingdean, keep a note of the dates and the number of items, because that is the record Mr Ward put in front of Royal Mail and then Parliament. You can also send us your news if your road is going days without a delivery.
Earlier this week Mr Ward backed Wear It Pink day, and last week he raised the closure of two Kemptown LGBTQ+ bars in the Commons.
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