Post Would Move Faster If Nobody Touched It, Panel Finds

Royal Mail has announced it expects to cut up to 2,500 jobs under what it calls an organisational review, which is the real news and the part nobody is disputing. The company says the reduction is about restructuring management layers and adapting to a country that sends fewer letters and buys more things online than it did when the network was designed. That is the stated reason, in the stated language, and it is being applied across the whole of the United Kingdom rather than to anywhere in particular.

Into that national conversation has walked the Bureau for Unhandled Correspondence, which has published its own review of how post moves and reached a conclusion the industry has somehow missed for four centuries. The single greatest obstacle to a letter arriving, the Bureau finds, is a person carrying it. Its recommendation is that outgoing mail be placed in a loose heap somewhere central and permitted to find its own way.

Haddenham, being the sort of place that volunteers for things, got the pilot. The heap went down near the green on Tuesday. By Wednesday a gas bill had reached Aston Sandford, which the Bureau logged as a success, and a wedding invitation had reached nobody at all, which it logged as a different kind of success.

"Handling is the problem," a man from the Bureau said, standing over the pile in a high-visibility waistcoat he had clearly bought himself. "Every pair of hands is a delay. Ideally the letter never meets anyone." I asked him who, under the new arrangement, would be putting the letters through the doors. He looked at the heap for a while, then at me, then said the review was ongoing and that the weather had been very kind to it so far.

What the Bureau has produced, in fairness, is the logical end of a sentence that has been said out loud in a great many British industries this decade, which is that the work would be considerably cheaper if the work were not done. The posties, meanwhile, remain the only part of the system that has ever actually got anything to a door, a fact the heap on the green demonstrates more clearly every time it rains.