A recipe for guaranteed delivery: post a ripe cheese with every letter

The Rosewall affair signifies everything that is wrong with Royal Mail. The two-and-a-half ton Rosewall sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth was acquired by the Ministry of Works and the Post Office in 1963 for a new Post Office Pension Fund building in Chesterfield, where it became a landmark — until last October, when it took a trip to the Bonhams saleroom in London. Royal Mail announced that Rosewall was no longer part of its ‘cultural heritage’, which of course had nothing to do with the £620,000 it was expected to raise at auction. But after much protest it was withdrawn from sale and repatriated to Chesterfield, presumably along with a very large haulage bill.

The whole saga is characteristic of a state-owned near-monopoly obsessed with quick financial fixes and unable to find an economic model that works. Last week it resorted to begging the government for a state-funded rescue package: chairman Allan Leighton and chief executive Adam Crozier wangled a market-distorting £3 billion to pay for ‘modernisation’ costs as well as plugging part of a £5.6 billion pension fund gap. But handouts like this are never the answer. The Royal Mail’s problem lies in its culture of inefficiency and resistance to change. Leighton and Crozier will receive handsome bonuses for achieving a record £355 million operating profit last year — but this performance had a lot less to do with management brilliance than with service cutbacks.

Post offices have been closed, deliveries and jobs (30,000 of them) axed, while our mail continues to disappear. If the Hepworth sculpture had been returned to Chesterfield by Parcel Force it would probably still be lost in a London sorting office, or in small pieces. Last year 14.6 million letters and parcels handled by Royal Mail were lost, stolen or damaged.