Royal Mail faces Ofcom questions over missed delivery targets
The postal regulator has launched an investigation into Royal Mail for missing its annual delivery targets, with almost a quarter of first-class mail arriving late,The company, which has been fined more than £16m in the last two years for failing to meet the delivery targets set by Ofcom, said 23,5% of first-class mail failed to arrive on time in the year to the end of March,This is a slight improvement on the previous year, when more than a quarter of first-class mail failed to arrive within the one-working-day target set by the regulator,Under the watchdog’s rules, 93% of first-class mail must be delivered within one working day of collection, excluding Christmas.
The latest delivery figures published by Royal Mail on Friday showed that it managed to deliver 92.2% of second-class mail within the three-working-day limit set by Ofcom.“We will investigate whether there are reasonable grounds for believing that Royal Mail has failed to comply with its obligations in 2024-25,” said a spokesperson for Ofcom.“If we determine that Royal Mail has failed to comply with its obligations, we will consider whether to impose a financial penalty.”In December 2024, Ofcom fined the company £10.
5m for failing to meet its delivery targets.The previous year, the postal regulator fined Royal Mail £5.6m for the same failure of its regulatory obligations.Alistair Cochrane, Royal Mail’s chief operating officer, admitted that the company’s quality of service was “not where we want it to be”.“We will continue to work hard to deliver the standards our customers expect,” he said.
“We are actively modernising Royal Mail, and while these efforts are beginning to deliver results, we know there is still more to do.”Last month, the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský’s EP Group completed a £3.6bn takeover of International Distributions Services, the owner of Royal Mail.Cochrane said Royal Mail would cooperate with Ofcom’s investigation but said the business was facing structural challenges and needed urgent reform of the universal service obligation to deliver at one-price nationwide six days a week.Earlier this year, Ofcom launched a consultation proposing that Royal Mail should be allowed to deliver second-class letters on alternate weekdays and to stop Saturday deliveries under changes to postal service rules.
Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionOfcom said cutting the deliveries to every other weekday with a price cap on second-class stamps, while maintaining first-class letters six days a week, would still meet the public’s needs.Its provisional recommendations also included cutting delivery targets for first-class mail from 93% to 90% arriving the next day, and for second-class mail from 98.5% to 95% within three days.Ofcom said it estimated the changes would enable Royal Mail to save between £250m and £425m each year.Tom MacInnes, the director of policy at Citizens Advice, said: “ Our research has shown the damaging consequences of late post, like missed health appointments, fines, bills and vital government communications.
But with no alternative provider to choose from, people are forced to grapple with poor service, yearon year.“With Ofcom considering relaxing the current delivery targets set for Royal Mail as part of the universal service obligation review, reliability remains a huge concern.The regulator must get off the sidelines and make the company do what it should have been doing all along – giving paying customers the service they deserve.”
Mountain marvel: how one of biggest batteries in Europe uses thousands of gallons of water to stop blackouts
‘Much-loved’ Dinorwig hydroelectric energy storage site in Wales has a vital role to play in keeping the lights onSeconds after a catastrophic series of power outages struck across the UK in the summer of 2019, a phone rang in the control room of the Dinorwig hydropower plant in north Wales. It was Britain’s energy system operator requesting an immediate deluge of electricity to help prevent a wide-scale blackout crippling Britain’s power grids.The response was swift, and in the end just under one million people were left without power for less than 45 minutes. While trains were stuck on lines for hours and hospitals had to revert to backup generators, that phone call prevented Britain’s worst blackout in a decade from being far more severe.Almost six years later, the owners of Dinorwig, and its sister plant at Ffestiniog on the boundary of Eryri national park, formerly Snowdonia, are preparing to pump up to £1bn into a 10-year refurbishment of the hydropower plants that have quietly helped to keep the lights on for decades
UK employees work from home more than most global peers, study finds
UK workers continue to work from home more than nearly any of their global counterparts more than five years after the pandemic first disrupted traditional office life, a study has found.UK employees now average 1.8 days a week of remote working, above the international average of 1.3 days, according to the Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA), a worldwide poll of more than 16,000 full-time, university-educated workers across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa that began in July 2021.Hybrid working patterns – in which the week is split between the office and another remote location such as home – have become established as the dominant model in advanced economies for staff who are able to carry out their roles remotely
Valuable tool or cause for alarm? Facial ID quietly becoming part of police’s arsenal
The future is coming at Croydon fast. It might not look like Britain’s cutting edge but North End, a pedestrianised high street lined with the usual mix of pawn shops, fast-food outlets and branded clothing stores, is expected to be one of two roads to host the UK’s first fixed facial recognition cameras.Digital photographs of passersby will be silently taken and processed to extract the measurements of facial features, known as biometric data. They will be immediately compared by artificial intelligence to images on a watchlist. Matches will trigger alerts
Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace’ as police use soars
Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing.Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches.Live facial recognition involves the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to the continual finger printing of members of the public as they go about their daily lives.Retrospective facial recognition software is used by the police to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems
‘I am free and happy’: Daria Kasatkina has no regrets ahead of first grand slam as Australian | Simon Cambers
When Daria Kasatkina announced that she had officially switched allegiance from Russia to Australia, she picked up her phone soon after to be greeted with whoops of delight from another Australian player, Daria Saville.“I was not telling anyone before it came out,” Kasatkina says to Guardian Australia on the eve of the 2025 French Open. “Dasha called me straightaway and she was so excited. She was so happy for me and I felt so happy because she was super-happy for me.“It was so natural and now we’re real neighbours
Co-driver dies after crash during Jim Clark rally in Scotland
A co-driver taking part in the Jim Clark rally in Scotland has died after a crash on Saturday morning.Dai Roberts, 39, was pronounced dead at the scene near Duns in the Scottish Borders.The driver, James Williams, 27, was taken to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh with serious but not life-threatening injuries.The rally’s organisers, the Jim Clark Memorial Motor Club, said the remainder of the event and Sunday’s Jim Clark Reivers rally had been cancelled.The Jim Clark rally is an annual closed-road motor sport race named after the late Formula One champion Jim Clark, who was killed in an accident in Hockenheim, Germany, in 1968
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