Royal Fail: Britain's postal service is falling apart
Apart from Lurpak, Lego and Kierkegaard, Denmark, for all its admirable qualities, hasn't been much of a trendsetter for Britain.
But now it might, and in a really bad way. Its state postal service, PostNord, is to stop delivering letters from next year to focus on parcels. So, after 400 years, there won't be any more letter deliveries and Denmark's 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear. The number of letters Danes send has fallen from 1.4 billion in 2000 to 110 million last year. That's a 90 per cent fall in a quarter of a century; quite a big deal.
Denmark is one of the most digitised countries on earth; most communication happens over a smartphone – which makes you wonder how people function if they lose them. But there is another factor, which may strike you as familiar. In Denmark, the introduction of a new Postal Act in 2024 opened up the letter market to competition from private firms and stamps are no longer exempt from VAT, resulting in higher postage costs: £3.35. 'When a letter costs 29 Danish krone (£3.35) there will be fewer letters,' PostNord Denmark's Managing Director, Kim Pedersen, observed.
It is at this point that we should all sit up and start bothering. Because the PostNord man has summed up the problem. It's cause and effect: if you make a service unaffordable, fewer people will use it, and if fewer people use it, that becomes the rationale for making the service unavailable.
The same genius argument has been used in Britain. Royal Mail wants to persuade Ofcom, the industry regulator, to allow it to reduce postal services drastically. Under the plans, there wouldn't be Saturday second class deliveries – only on alternate weekdays.
Well, that's just great, isn't it? And let's remind ourselves at this point that a first class stamp is now £1.65 and a second class 85p. That only dawned on most people at Christmas when they found that their cards cost less than the price of a first class stamp.
Not so long ago it was shocking when the price broke the pound barrier, but the increases since have been fast and inexorable. And yes, it is all, as in Denmark, down to privatisation. The latest brilliant plan for a worse and more expensive service follows the Government's go-ahead for a Czech billionaire, Daniel Kretinsky, to take over the service for £3.57 billion. The Tories started the rot by separating the Post Office from Royal Mail before privatising both, and presided over the astonishing increases in the cost of the service. Labour doesn't seem any more bothered.
Second class post should not mean this much of a second class service. You expect a second class delivery to take a day or two longer, not three days a week. And any idiot can see that it won't be long before Royal Mail can make another Danish-style efficiency by closing its post boxes, or retaining them, as with old telephone boxes, for picturesque effect. Tried to use one lately? You'll find, if you're not an early bird, that the collection has been and gone at 9am, unless you're unlucky and it goes at 7am, Monday to Fridays. Stand by for the next big reveal, that the number of letters being dropped off in postboxes has gone into decline.
Do they think we're stupid? Well, yes, of course they do. But let's point out now that if a letter dropped off in a postbox won't go anywhere until the following day, of course you're probably going to make your way to the nearest post office instead. It's way less convenient than a post box, with postmen doing the collecting, but tough; your convenience doesn't matter.
We'll really miss the postal service if it goes the way of Denmark, and letters become a forgotten medium – along with handwriting, displaced by emails. But we can do something meanwhile. Ofcom would really love to hear from you: let them have it.
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