New vehicles investments

The red van is synonymous with Royal Mail and you cannot go far in any street across the UK without seeing one. They are an important part of our operation and our brand, as well as a source of pride. However, I know from your direct feedback that the age of our vehicles is an issue for many of our colleagues. 

As such, upgrading our fleet is one of our top priorities – primarily to ensure we have safe vehicles for our people to work in, but also to allow us to provide excellent service to our customers through meeting our operational requirements (especially following recent network changes).  I’m delighted to let you know that we have placed orders for more than 5,300 new vehicles (see further below), 2,100 of which are electric vans. 

Electric vans are an important part of our future fleet. We are proud to be the greenest delivery company in the UK with the lowest reported carbon emissions per parcel and the UK’s largest electric van delivery fleet with c.5,000. I’m very pleased that we will be adding to these as part of the replacement plan. 

In addition, bringing in new Euro 6 compliant diesel vans and trucks will also have an environmental benefit as they will replace older and less efficient counterparts, reducing fuel use and providing a further slight reduction in carbon emissions.  

The investment we have made, one of the largest in recent years, replaces 12% of our total fleet including Parcelforce and Relay. 

Some of these new vehicles have already started to arrive across the business. The majority will be in place to support the business at peak and will also provide an additional resource to relieve network pressure as any existing vehicles they are replacing will be removed from service post peak. 

I look forward to seeing our new fleet out on the roads across the UK with the new Cruciform and Cypher. I hope we can all take pride and treat them with the respect they deserve.  We are already looking at next year’s replacement plan and I will share more detail when this is finalised. 

 Deployment timeline

To set ourselves up for a successful peak, we plan to deliver more than half of the new van fleet to delivery offices by November and delay the removal of the existing vehicles they are replacing, post peak, to boost our fleet size and reduce our reliance on hire vehicles during this busier time.