Royal Mail announces new stamp rules ‘from April 2024’ and says ‘no longer’
Royal Mail stamps are set to increase within weeks as first class price rises 10p. From 2 April 2024, the price of First Class stamps will increase by 10p to £1.35 and the price of Second Class stamps will increase by 10p to 85p.
The average adult spends less than £7 a year on stamped letters and people now receive on average just two letters per week, it adds.ened a call for inputs to look at options for reform of the USO given the dramatic reduction in letter volumes in recent years.
The new price of First and Second Class stamps remain well below European mean average prices of £1.66 for First Class and £1.26 for Second Class. Nick Landon, chief commercial officer at Royal Mail, said: “We always consider price changes very carefully, but we face a situation where letter volumes have reduced dramatically over recent years while costs have increased.
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“It is no longer sustainable to maintain a network built for 20 billion letters when we are now only delivering seven billion. As a result of letter volume decline, our posties now have to walk more than three times as far to deliver the same number of letters as before, increasing the delivery costs per letter.” Responding to the changes, one Brit fumed: “Easy prediction here, people will stop bothering with 1st class stamps and move to 2nd.”
A second raged: “The post office need to learn how to do their job before increasing the prices. Last week, I had a package sent from Leicester to here in Durham. Posted on monday by Royal mail tracked 48, it arrived here on Friday. It had somehow been on a visit to Torquay. Similarly a package from Birmingham took over a week on tracked 48.
“It had been found after a search, in Essex. I emailed Post Office HQ and asked what does the 48 stand for? Any reasonably sane person would think 48 hours but does it mean days, weeks perhaps. They said that 48 hours is an aim but not a certainty. That sounds like a misleading description to me.”
