Royal Mail has been fined £10.5 million by the regulator for failing to meet its delivery targets for first and second class mail.
This is the second year in a row that the company has been fined by Ofcom for poor delivery performance.
The regulator said Royal Mail had failed to “significantly improve service levels”.
It says 74.7% of first-class mail and 92.7% of second-class mail were delivered on time in 2023-24, well below targets of 93% and 98.5%.
Ofcom said the company blamed its poor performance on its difficult financial situation and delays in voting on a pay deal following a strike by Communications Workers Union members last year.
However, Ofcom said: “We do not consider any of these reasons to be justifiable reasons for Royal Mail's failure to provide the levels of service expected of it.
“Royal Mail took insufficient and ineffective action to try to avoid this failure, which likely affected millions of customers who did not receive the service they had paid for.”
Last year, Royal Mail was fined £5.6 million for the same reason.
Ofcom said that as well as the fine, it had put pressure on the company to see what it was doing to improve its performance.
Although there had been some progress, he said performances in 2023/24 had been only “slightly better” and “we need to do a lot better”.
News of this latest fine comes as Royal Mail's parent company, International Distribution Services, faces a likely takeover by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky's EP Group.
