Turnaround and grow

At the heart of our Group strategy is a five-year transformation plan for Royal Mail in the UK. We will invest around £1.8bn to change and grow our business.    

The number of UK domestic letters in our mailbag is forecast to decline by around 26% over the next five years*. 

We have done a comprehensive review of our business. All the analysis told us that we have to change. 

We will extend our network to handle Next Day, large parcels and small Tracked items more efficiently.

• Will introduce a second daily delivery for larger items and parcels purchased online from retailers the evening before. This will be fully operational by 2023.
• Three new fully-automated parcel hubs will be built to handle Next Day, large and smaller Tracked parcels. A separate van delivery for these items will be routed through potentially 200-300 of our large Delivery Offices.
• This will reduce the cost of handling all parcels, including small items.

 We have informed our union about our plan. We are committed to working collaboratively with our unions on the strategy, detailed design and deployment, including a trial for separate van delivery.

Renewed focus on productivity: we will improve existing processes, embed new digitally-enabled work tools and introduce a major increase in parcel sorting automation. We are aiming for a cumulative improvement of 15-18% over five years.

New initiatives for customers and e-retailers: we will collect returns from consumers at home; offer more inflight redirections for individual parcels; and introduce 1,400 parcel postboxes, as announced on Monday.

This is a demanding change programme and will be carefully sequenced over five years: we anticipate an hours reduction of around 3% a year. We are committed to working carefully and considerately with our unions and our colleagues. We have a good track record of delivering change sensitively through natural turnover, redeployment and voluntary redundancy wherever possible. In line with current agreements, we will continue to deliver change without compulsory redundancies.

More information

Click here to read today’s Colleague Update.

Click here to watch today’s RMtv Special which covers the key points of today’s announcement. Next week’s programme will focus on what our UK transformation means for colleagues across the business.

*The outlook for UK mail volumes to 2028, PwC, April 2019