RECENTLY I enjoyed a few days in Wester Ross and Sutherland.

Walking across the little hills on the northernmost part of the Coigach peninsula, beyond Achiltibuie, my wife and I could see in the distance a little red mail van going slowly round, stopping here and there as it delivered to the scattered community. The next day, further north in Lochinver, we saw two mail vans preparing for similar tortuous journeys over winding single-track roads with passing places.

Delivering a single letter in the far north of Scotland involves a lot of cost for the Royal Mail. We have in the UK what is known as the universal service. You pay the same to post a letter from Penzance to Achiltibuie as to post a letter from Glasgow to Airdrie. This means that the delivery of a first-class letter, the day after posting, is a considerable triumph if the letter is, say, posted in Cornwall and delivered in the far north of Shetland. Indeed it amounts to quite extraordinary value for money.

But if you take out the social dimension and look at it purely from a commercial point of view, it's clearly ridiculous. People far away from the main population centres – a small minority of the 30 million or so postal addresses in the UK – are being subsidised by the majority, including the majority of poor people, to an extraordinary degree, each and every time they receive a letter.

That is one of the reasons why the actual cost of posting a letter is becoming so expensive. Yesterday the price of a second-class stamp went up from 36p to 50p; a first-class stamp went up from 46 to 60p. Even with these huge rises, the Royal Mail will struggle to make a profit on its letter delivering service.

One solution would be to make deliveries in really remote areas less frequent – say twice a week instead of six times a week, which is the obligation currently placed on the Royal Mail. I don't think this would be socially divisive. There are obviously far more low-income individuals and families living in our main conurbations and concentrated centres of population than in the far-flung areas.

An alternative – and this might be a more reasonable solution – would be for people living in the outer fringes of the UK to arrange to pick up their mail from some fixed point, possibly quite a fair distance away from where they actually live.

The postal service is paid for by the senders of mail, not the receivers. Yesterday's swingeing cost increases will affect every individual who sends a letter, and every business as well, even those who hardly ever – or never – send mail to very remote locations, and this is hardly equitable.

Another significant cost saving could be made by reducing the number of pillar boxes in the UK. There are about 115,000 at present which is too many, necessitating far too many separate collections. In some cities there are several pillar boxes within a couple of minutes' walk of each other. This is obviously unnecessary; we need fewer, though possibly bigger, pillar boxes.

I am an enthusiastic customer of the Royal Mail; despite the technological tyranny of our electronic age I still like to send and receive communications by the old-fashioned post, or the snail mail as it is disparagingly known. I suspect this is true of many folk and not only older people. Maybe the swingeing increase in the cost of a stamp is just a cynical ploy to accelerate the inevitable – the eventual total disappearance of the paper post.

The process is already well under way. The Royal Mail currently delivers around 60 million items a day to all parts of Britain, including the furthest and most distant parts. This is a remarkable logistical achievement and is probably not sufficiently appreciated. But for some time the volume of mail has been decreasing, at around five per cent a year.