Royal Mail is to launch a Sunday delivery service

Royal Mail is beginning a Sunday parcel delivery service with major retailers to tap into the online shopping boom.

The company said it hoped to ‘usher in a new era’ of trusted, seven-day-a-week deliveries when the scheme begins next month.

Royal Mail, which said this week that revenues had soared by £900million to £8.6billion in the past year, delivered 496 million parcels in the last three months of 2020 – an all-time high.

Customers have now come to expect Sunday deliveries, which are part and parcel of services offered by online retailers such as Amazon.

Royal Mail will start off with a number of as yet unnamed major retailers before expanding over the year.

Postman wears a mask to deliver letters in Broadstairs, Kent. Royal Mail, which said this week that revenues had soared by £900million to £8.6billion in the past year, delivered 496 million parcels in the last three months of 2020 – an all-time high

Nick Landon, chief commercial officer at Royal Mail, said: ‘The UK already trusts us to deliver their purchases six days a week both quickly and conveniently. Now for the first time our posties will be doing the same thing seven days a week.

‘The last year has reset so many customer expectations and the desire for even more convenient and even more frequent parcel deliveries has certainly been one of them.

‘We always listen to our customers, both senders and recipients, and the ask here was clear: we love what you do Monday to Saturday, so please do the same on a Sunday. So that’s what we’re doing, as quickly as possible so we can offer it to more and more customers across the course of this year.’

Royal Mail will start off with a number of as yet unnamed major retailers before expanding over the year

A huge new Royal Mail parcel hub is also being built in Daventry, Northamptonshire. The size of more than ten football pitches, it will be able to process more than a million parcels a day.

Delivery services have boomed during the pandemic as customers turned to online shopping while high street stores have been closed.

At its peak, Royal Mail delivered 11.7 million in one day during its bumper period at the end of last year – almost a third more than its busiest day of the first national lockdown last spring.

At the time, the company said it expected to make an operating profit ‘well in excess’ of £500 million in the financial year ending in March, which has now been revised to £700 million.