Royal Mail has agreed on a timetable with the Communication Workers Union (CWU) to finish rolling out its new Universal Service delivery model, with the last 107 delivery offices waiting until after Christmas.
The model, known as DM26, keeps First Class letter deliveries six days a week and the one-price-goes-anywhere principle. Second Class letters move to every other weekday. Parcels are not affected.
The timetable
Royal Mail said the new model is now running in around 90 per cent of its delivery offices. Of the 122 offices still to switch:
- 15 will deploy by 2 November 2026
- 107 will keep preparing through the Christmas peak, with deployment resuming on 11 January 2027
Royal Mail had previously said it expected implementation across its c.1,200 delivery offices to be complete by December 2026. Royal Mail and the CWU will jointly review the performance of offices as they deploy the model.
Performance figures
Royal Mail reported the following year-on-year changes:
- First Class performance up from 76 per cent to 85 per cent
- Second Class performance up from 89.3 per cent to 91.4 per cent
- Offices on the new model delivering to around 95 per cent of addresses each day on average, compared with 88 per cent before rollout began
Chief executive Alistair Cochrane said there was “still more to do”, but that the progress gave the business confidence in the new model.
Christmas preparations
For the peak period, Royal Mail said it has 22,000 seasonal workers, five additional seasonal parcel sort centres, 7,500 hire vans and more than 1,400 extra road haulage contractors a day.
The announcement follows the CWU’s call on 9 October for a pause to further rollout until problems at offices where the model was not working had been addressed.
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