13 years of Royal Mail privatisation, how are we feeling about it?
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
31 points (100.0% liked)
United Kingdom
6820 readers
198 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Wow, but imagine if they hadn’t sold the Royal Mail for £1.
Why isn’t NHS exempt from Royal Mail fees? This is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever seen; healthcare isn’t optional.
Don't worry, I'm sure the privatisation will bring costs down... any minute now. Vince Cable says so.
I'm sure their core of "high quality investors" will be along to sort it out any minute now, won't they Mr Cable? You lying sack of shit.
But just think what the UK would have been like if Thatcher and those "Winston Churchill"-sprited neo liberals hadn't privatised everything: a perpetual cost of living crisis, low wages, high mortgages and rents, housing shortages, sky-high energy costs, hosepipe bans, sewage pumped into our rivers and seas, declining welfare services, town centres boarded up... oh... maybe not then...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't any alternative for sending letters is it? So essentially they have us by the balls.
Well there's email / NHS App, where letters get published digitally. If they do anything like my bank where you can opt-out of paper communcations then that would save some £ by not having to send mail to people that don't want it. There's obviously going to be a portion of the demographics that would prefer to receive physical mail, but they'll be declining over time.
There's also 3rd party companies that will handle mail (pick up, processing) and put it into the RM network at the end for a cheaper price than RM do. Not sure if the NHS are using that already though.
Yeah true, when their systems aren't malfunctioning (they sent me the same letter 4 times in error when my local trust moved to a new system, despite having opted in for paperless correspondence, but that's another can of worms).
I meant letters in general though, could Joe Public use any of those 3rd parties if they want to send, say, a few large letters? I recently tried to do a diy grassroot campaign with my union, we wanted to send badges to our members but the cost of stamps was prohibitively high and we could not find any 3rd party that would do it for us. And we didn't want to open a business account for what's likely to be a one off.
No I don't think so, it's for bulk senders. I'm guessing the badge made it too thick for a standard 2c post?
Exactly, you're spot on. We decided in the end it was not the best use of our members' money so we pivoted to self-serve, but it does highlight the unfair monopoly that Royal Mail has on letters.