A saturday night conversation with my sister-in-law and her husband involved them complaining about the Royal Mail delivering packages incorrectly over the past couple of months. I've also had this experience, and my suspicion is that these little 'spanners in the works' are politically motivated - it only takes a small number of people to make mistakes to have a noticable effect on our opinions of Royal Mail and 'the need for improvements by the private sector'. Perhaps some pro-privatisation managers over-work their employees for a while, leading to inevitable mistakes? Who knows, but there are doubtless many ways to introduce errors into most systems.
Well, today a package of something I sold on eBay arrived later than expected. It was two days late, despite me having used postcode 'TA6' rather than 'TA16' - quite a large margin of error, especially in Somerset which is largely rural (and therefore postcode areas cover larger geographical areas).
In spite of this, and a mis-spelling of the destination village name, and the omission of the county (I usually omit this, on the basis that the postcode is the most meaningful part of the address), the Royal Mail were able to determine the correct address and re-route the package in two days or less.
Of course, when things do go wrong, it's often very annoying. The tendency seems to be to blame Royal Mail, but not to credit them when it finally arrives.
Although I don't usually address packages so badly, I do occasionally receive badly addressed packages. So this standard seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
That's quite staggering really - the volume of items that the Royal Mail deliver and I can't think of a single example of my mail going missing, and in the cases where things are late, it usually turns out to be the sender's fault.
My feeling on the part-privatisation of Royal Mail is that this would be a loss to the country. Given the increased demand for postal services thanks to online-selling, I can understand why private capital wants to get it's naturally greedy paws on it. But really, you could argue that logistics infrastructure will be increasingly important in our increasingly eBusiness economy, and that this should therefore be maintained in public ownership as it currently is, in its already wonderfully efficient form.