The future of letter deliveries

Royal Mail plays a vital role in connecting the nation with its one-price-goes-anywhere service. The law, as defined by the Universal Service Obligation, requires Royal Mail to collect and deliver to all addresses in the UK six days a week.

But with the rise of email and digital communications, we are sending fewer letters, and addresses now receive just four letters a week on average. Change is needed to make the postal service more efficient while protecting choice of price, speed and reliability for people across all corners of the UK.

Our challenge

Changing customer needs

Letter volumes have declined from a peak of 20 billion a year to 6.7 billion. In four years time, letter volumes could drop to 4 billion while parcels continue to grow.

Rising costs

As letter volumes decline, the number of UK addresses has grown by four million over the last 20 years, so the cost of delivering each letter is increasing. Royal Mail made an adjusted operating loss of £348 million in the 2023/24 financial year.

UK left behind

Many countries - from Germany and France, to Canada and New Zealand – have already made changes to how quickly and how often letters are delivered.

What do we want to change?

We would like to deliver letters in a way that meets the needs of our customers today and in the future, and protects the one-price-goes-anywhere service while allowing Royal Mail to operate more efficiently.

We have listened to a wide range of customers and stakeholders to understand what they want from a modern Universal Service and in April 2024 submitted our proposal to Ofcom on what the future should look like.

What does our proposal say?

It protects what matters most to customers with limited change and no change to:

  • The one-price-goes-anywhere service to all parts of the United Kingdom
  • 1st Class letters delivered six days a week (Monday to Saturday) 
  • Parcels delivered up to seven days a week
  • The option of 1st Class and 2nd Class letters and parcels

 
The proposal includes vital changes to deliver a more efficient and more financially sustainable Universal Service:

  • All non-1st Class letter deliveries, including 2nd Class, would be delivered every other weekday, Monday to Friday. We aim to continue to deliver 2nd Class within three working days.
  • The delivery speed of standard bulk business letters (used for items like bills and statements) would be aligned to 2nd Class, so they arrive within three working days instead of two.

 
Listening to what customers have told us is important, we are also calling on Ofcom to modernise the Universal Service for the digital age by introducing the following new features:

  • The introduction of new, additional reliability targets for 1st Class and 2nd Class services, alongside revised, realistic speed targets
  • Tracking added to Universal Service parcels to reflect customer demand.

What happens next?

Following their Call for Input in 2024, Ofcom launched a consultation with stakeholders on the future of the USO in January 2025, with a specific focus on Royal Mail’s proposal for change. Ofcom is expected to publish its decision in Summer 2025.

To ensure everything runs smoothly and we can deliver a better customer experience if we deploy any Universal Service changes, we will be piloting our proposals in 37 of our c.1,200 delivery offices across the UK from February.

  • We aim to continue delivering 2nd Class within 3 days, from Monday to Friday, within the pilot areas.
  • Standard bulk business letters will be delivered within 3 days.
  • We will no longer deliver non 1st Class letters and other non priority business letters on Saturdays.

Nothing else will change. We'll continue to deliver 1st Class mail six days week and parcels up to seven days a week.

We'll keep delivering letters and parcels as you are used to, throughout the rest of the UK.

Keeping you updated

We’ll keep you updated as this progresses. For now we just keep delivering letters and parcels as you are used to. For more information on our submission to Ofcom, visit internationaldistributionservices.com