24th August 2026
There was a time when putting a letter in the post meant something fairly simple. it would be collected, transported and delivered within a reasonably predictable period.
That certainty is becoming harder to find.
Royal Mail is now in the middle of one of the biggest changes to the postal service in decades. Second-class letters are being delivered on fewer days, the official performance targets have been reduced, and the changes are expected to be fully implemented across the country by December.
The justification is straightforward. Far fewer letters are being sent than in the past, while the cost of maintaining a six-day universal postal service has continued to rise.
But there is a rather awkward question sitting underneath the reforms:
If Royal Mail is already struggling to deliver letters on time, will reducing the number of delivery days actually make the service more reliable — or simply make a poor service less frequent?
The latest figures provide little reassurance.
Royal Mail is still missing its targets
The figures for April to June 2026 show that Royal Mail delivered 85% of First Class mail within one working day.
The new Ofcom target is 90%.
For Second Class mail, Royal Mail delivered 91.4% within three working days, against a new target of 95%.
In other words, Royal Mail is missing both targets — even though the targets themselves were reduced from the previous standards.
The First Class target was cut from 93% to 90%, while the Second Class target was reduced dramatically from 98.5% to 95%.
Royal Mail's performance has improved compared with the previous year, when just 76% of First Class and 89.3% of Second Class mail met the relevant targets.
But improvement is not the same thing as success.
And Ofcom has already opened an investigation into Royal Mail's failure to meet its delivery targets for the second consecutive year.
The delivery service is being reduced
The changes are particularly significant for Second Class mail.
Instead of the traditional six-day-a-week service from Monday to Saturday, Second Class letters will be delivered on alternate weekdays.
Royal Mail says the change is necessary because the volume of letters being sent has fallen dramatically.
The new system is being introduced gradually across approximately 1,200 delivery offices, with the company expecting the rollout to be complete by December 2026.
The argument is that the postal service must adapt to modern life.
People send fewer letters because they use email, online banking, messaging and digital services.
That is undoubtedly true.
But there is another side to the story.
The people who still depend upon letters are often those who cannot simply opt out of the postal system.
Citizens Advice is deeply concerned
Citizens Advice has been particularly critical.
Following the latest figures, it said that late deliveries are continuing to cause people to miss medical appointments, benefit decisions and bills.
It also pointed out that Royal Mail has failed to meet its annual delivery targets for six consecutive years.
The organisation is now calling on Ofcom to use stamp-price controls to prevent Royal Mail continuing to increase prices while failing to meet its delivery standards.
That is a powerful argument.
The price of First Class postage has risen by 137% over the same period, according to Citizens Advice, while Second Class postage has risen by 40%.
So customers are being asked to pay substantially more for a service which has not consistently met the standards expected of it.
This is not just about Christmas cards.
It would be easy to dismiss the decline of letter deliveries as inevitable.
After all, most people can send an email instantly.
But postal services still carry things that matter enormously.
Medical appointments.
Hospital letters.
Benefit decisions.
Legal correspondence.
Bills.
Fines.
Official documents.
For many people, receiving a letter is not a nostalgic experience. It is an important part of managing their lives.
Citizens Advice's research earlier this year found that an estimated 16 million people — 29% of UK adults — experienced postal delays over Christmas.
More worryingly, 5.7 million people said they had suffered serious consequences, including missing health appointments, fines and benefit decisions.
That changes the nature of the debate.
This isn't simply about whether somebody receives their Christmas cards two days late.
Rural communities could feel the changes particularly sharply
There is another dimension which deserves attention in communities such as Caithness.
The economics of postal delivery are different in rural areas.
A delivery route can cover many miles while serving relatively few addresses. There are fewer opportunities to spread the costs over a dense urban population.
At the same time, rural communities can have greater reliance on physical services because broadband, transport and access to offices or facilities may not always be as convenient.
The universal service obligation exists partly because of this problem.
It is supposed to ensure that people across the country continue to have access to a reasonably consistent postal service, regardless of where they live.
The question is how far that principle can be stretched when the underlying economics have changed so dramatically.
The Government and Ofcom face a difficult balancing act
There is a perfectly rational economic argument for reform.
If letter volumes have collapsed, maintaining exactly the same infrastructure and delivery frequency as when millions more letters were being sent every day is difficult to justify.
Royal Mail needs to become financially sustainable.
It has also committed to investing £500 million over five years as part of its plan to improve the service and meet the new targets by spring 2027.
So this isn't simply a case of Royal Mail abandoning the postal service.
The company argues that reform is necessary to create a more reliable and sustainable service for the future.
But that brings us back to the central question.
Less frequent but more reliable?
There is a compelling logic behind the reforms if they deliver what they promise.
If Royal Mail has fewer delivery rounds to organise, it should theoretically be able to concentrate resources on the remaining services.
Perhaps fewer deliveries can mean better deliveries.
But that proposition needs to be demonstrated.
At the moment, Royal Mail is asking customers to accept fewer Second Class delivery days while simultaneously failing to meet its newly reduced performance targets.
That makes it understandable that Citizens Advice is sceptical.
The concern is that the reduction in service could become permanent while the promised improvement in reliability remains somewhere in the future.
The six-year problem
Perhaps the most troubling statistic is not this quarter's 85% or 91.4%.
It is the fact that Royal Mail has failed to meet its annual delivery targets for six consecutive years.
That suggests this is not simply a temporary problem caused by one difficult year.
Something more fundamental has changed.
The postal system is being asked to operate with fewer letters, higher costs, changing customer behaviour and increasing competition from digital communications and parcel delivery.
Royal Mail has to adapt.
But consumers also need to know that the service they are paying for will actually work.
The bargain is changing
Perhaps the most important thing happening here is that the old bargain between Royal Mail and the public is being rewritten.
The old expectation was that a universal postal service meant relatively frequent deliveries at a predictable standard.
The new model is moving towards something different: fewer letters, fewer Second Class delivery days and lower performance targets, justified by the economic realities of a shrinking letter market.
That may ultimately be unavoidable.
But if the bargain is changing, the public deserves transparency about what it is getting in return.
If there are fewer delivery days, the deliveries that remain should surely become more reliable.
If the targets are lower, Royal Mail should be expected to meet them.
And if stamp prices continue to rise, customers are entitled to ask why.
The postal service may no longer be the central means of communication it once was.
But for millions of people, it remains important.
The challenge now is to make sure that in modernising Royal Mail, we don't accidentally create a service that is cheaper to operate but increasingly difficult for the people who still depend upon it.
**Fewer letters may be inevitable.
Fewer reliable letters should not be.**