It’s time to bring back Postman Pat.

He picks up all the post, but wouldn’t it be nice if Royal Mail did that? Because it’s been fined £21 million by Ofcom, its third major penalty in as many years, for failing to meet its own delivery targets.

Ofcom says the company delivered just 77 per cent of first-class mail on time, and 92 per cent of second-class post, far below its targets, even after those were quietly lowered earlier this year.

The regulator says Royal Mail took insufficient and ineffective steps to fix the problem. Letters arriving weeks late, missed court summonses, even eviction notices delayed.

Now Ofcom is warning the fines will continue unless Royal Mail shows meaningful progress but the situation may actually be worse than the figures suggest.

Because of the way Royal Mail measures its own performance, all across the country the final collection times on postboxes have quietly been moved to 9am, and 7am on Saturdays.

Meaning if you post a letter after breakfast, it won’t be collected until the next day. I went to investigate this in my local area of SW1.

I thought I’d demonstrate by trying to post a letter where I live in SW1. I had a second-class stamp on it — why? Because first-class post is a con.

You pay much more and it doesn’t get there anything like the amount of time it’s meant to. It’s not the next day. It’s not much better than second-class. It’s just a routine, bread-and-butter letter.

I discovered that the last collection Monday to Friday is 9 am, that basically adds a full extra day to every delivery.

Even the targets Royal Mail fails to meet are a con. On Saturdays it’s 7am so you’ve got to write your letters pretty early on a Saturday to get the post.

I tried the second nearest postbox but once again it was 9 am. all these postboxes used to have a last collection at 7 in the evening.

They’ve taken a full ten hours off the whole of the effective working day. And they’ve done it without telling anybody.

It’s all been done under the counter, so nobody knows that posting a letter now takes a day longer regardless of your stamp, regardless of the targets and prices have gone up. It’s an absolute con.

No wonder nobody’s writing letters anymore. the Post Office can’t be bothered to collect them, and even then it delivers them late. It’s an utter failure.

The statistical fiddling helps the postal service appear to be closer to its targets, while the reality for customers is slow deliveries and long waits.

Royal Mail accepts Ofcom’s decision and says it’s working hard to make sustained improvements, with more staff, more training, and more support for delivery offices.

But for customers who still rely on the post, from birthday cards to legal document, confidence in Royal Mail is unlikely to improve unless collection times get better.

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There is, perhaps, a solution. The great P.G. Wodehouse was famously said never to have bothered to post his own letters.

Instead, he would write them, stamp and address the envelopes, and then throw them out of his window — trusting that the honest and public-spirited people of Britain would find them and kindly drop them into the nearest postbox for him.

He said: “Someone always picks it up — and it saves me going down four flights of stairs every time I want to mail a letter.”