Ofcom has today fined Royal Mail £21,000,000 for failing to meet its First and Second Class delivery targets in the 2024/25 financial year.
This is the third time Ofcom have found the company in breach of its regulatory obligations in recent years, after we fined it £5.6m in November 2023 and £10.5m in December 2024.
In the 2024/25 financial year, Royal Mail only delivered 77% of First Class mail and 92.5% of Second Class mail on time, well short of 93% and 98.5% targets. This was even after accounting for exceptional weather events. Ofcom have therefore decided that the company breached its obligations by failing to provide an acceptable level of service without justification.
Royal Mail presented Ofcom with an improvement plan for 2024/25, aiming to achieve 85% for First Class mail and 97% for Second Class mail by March 2025. This would have amounted to significant improvement. However, this has not materialised. Ofcom say that Royal Mail took insufficient and ineffective steps to try and prevent this failure, which is likely to have impacted millions of customers who did not get the service they paid for.
Millions of important letters are arriving late, and people aren’t getting what they pay for when they buy a stamp. These persistent failures are unacceptable, and customers expect and deserve better.
Royal Mail must rebuild consumers’ confidence as a matter of urgency. And that means making actual significant improvements, not more empty promises. We’ve told the company to publicly set out how it’s going to deliver this change, and we expect to start seeing meaningful progress soon. If this doesn’t happen, fines are likely to continue.
– Ian Strawhorne, Director of Enforcement, Ofcom
We acknowledge the decision made by Ofcom today and we will continue to work hard to deliver further sustained improvements to our quality of service.
A key area of focus and investment has been the detailed work ahead of full implementation of our new delivery model, enabled by Ofcom’s changes to the Universal Service. This is critical to enable us to drive a step change in quality of service.
We have also implemented important changes across our network including recruiting, retaining and training our people, and providing additional support to delivery offices.
Where we have piloted Universal Service changes, we can see that our model is working, with improvements in deliveries. This will help us deliver a modern, reliable and more financially sustainable postal service that meets the needs of today’s postal users.
– Royal Mail
This Royal Mail of £21,000,000, which will be passed in full to HM Treasury, is actually a discount! Not only is this the third largest fine Ofcom has ever imposed, it includes a 30% reduction from the £30,000,000 Ofcom would otherwise have imposed, reflecting Royal Mail’s admissions of liability and agreement to settle the case!
5 Responses
Now I know why Royal Mail is giving me FALSE IPROL for unreadable barcodes every few weeks.
They need to get in as much money as possible for their FINE.
No other courier has an issue reading my labels.
The collection posties have no problem scanning the label.
It’s only Royal Mail’s equipment that has an issue due to the speed, and that is MY fault.
I have appealed these countless times, and they have supplied just about every excuse from “After the machine has spat it out, it’s examined by a human” The photos of the labels show slight issues in the Royal Mail logo. Not the barcode or the QR code or the alphanumeric tracking code.
Scandalous and makes me think back to the barcoded stamps debacle.
Keep a spreadsheet of them. I do, and I’m sure there is a pattern or 2.
I can go a month without any surcharges, then scroll down to the bottom of my invoice and there are the IPROL surcharges, sigh.
It’s not a lot of money, but I don’t think it’s the print quality. I use many different types of packaging to send goods via Royal Mail, but 99% of the time, it is the same box that is getting the IPROLs. It’s a strong enough box, so I don’t think it causes the problem, but it is strange that there aren’t other boxes getting surcharged, or jiffy bags, which you could understand getting squashed and unreadable.
It is always the same mail centre as well. That sounds obvious, but sometimes they forward them on to the nearby Super-Hub without opening or processing, and the parcels get the first scan there. There have been no IPROL surcharges when the Super-Hub does the first scan.
I have got credits a few times. I have found by checking the POD photo or requesting a photo as it passes through their network, that the original barcode hadn’t been overlabelled, which meant no surcharge was due. It’s not worth doing it for the money, but just so maybe the staff in the CS dept start to realise that their system isn’t perfect afterall.
I have indeed been requesting the photos.
I get the feeling that when there isn’t an OVERlabel, they make some other excuse about my printer and examine the label to find the tiniest imperfection!!
I hope it wastes their time as it does mine, but in that immortal BUZZWORD, it does help my mental health!
Everything about them is underhanded, unfortunately.
As you say, it’s not for the money but the audacity of Royal Mail makes my blood boil.
No overlabel means no problem, so should also mean no surcharge. I’ve always got a credit when they haven’t actually done it. Sometimes just asking for a photo has triggered a credit. Either they’ve not been able to supply a photo, or they’ve looked, seen the original label passing through their network just fine, realised it needed a credit and just got on with it.
A waste of time, but the more often you do it, the quicker it is to complete their pointlessly long form.
I can imagine at some point they’ll stop responding to these information requests to save money, but if their invoices gave us sufficient details in the first place, or we could download it ourselves from somewhere, we wouldn’t need to bother them.
RE No overlabel.
For us they often say they DON’T have to provide the photo and sometimes don’t, which is what I find suspicious.
It’s only made me, in recent times, be MUCH more proactive to claim for ANYTHING that I can, so ultimately, Royal Mail have lost more than they have gained.
As you mentioned, in the end, it must take Royal Mail so much time to answer these queries, so hopefully, something will change for the better.
I find their whole ticket system to be awkward by design.
You submit a single claim and they reply with a reference but nothing else about what its for. So now, I reply to the [email protected] with the actual details so that when the 90 days for international claims has passed and it comes back from snooze, I know exactly what it’s about and have to forward to enquiries to try and get a response.