"Dave Plowman (News)" posted
Yes, that was the original idea. But since then, e-mail has been invented. The result is that the vast majority of communications that used to be done by paper delivery are now done by email. The rump - which I have caricatured as Granny's birthday cards - is not enough to keep the universal delivery service viable at a single stamp price that anyone is prepared to pay.
RM know this perfectly well. For decades they have employed some of the most intelligent people in the universe to inform their policy, one of them being Richard Hooper, who published a report on the topic in September 2010:
But knowing about this trend isn't the same as stopping it happening. Obviously it can't be stopped. So RM is now in a phase of managing the decline of paper letter delivery, with as much support from government as it can get. In the meantime it has to make its other activities more profitable.