Roz,
While I am sure that there are management issues within Royal Mail, it's not true that all the problems lie with them. Having worked on the sorting machinery many years ago, we were not allowed to sort down to routing / house order because the Union would call the postie out on strike, so the final sorting of post had to be done by hand thus 'preserving jobs'. Companies like Deutsche Post and TNT do not have this limitation and are thus more cost efficient and this is one of the reasons they can undercut the Royal Mail.