For once the standard new Labour cliché is apt. This time it really is all about delivery. How is a universal mail service to be guaranteed? Lord Mandelson has welcomed the recommendation of the Hooper review of the Royal Mail that new minority owners should be sought. The new partners will take at least a third of the company in a deal that could be worth £3 billion. Part-privatisation, in other words, and part right as a result.

It is clear that something had to give. The Royal Mail loses 6p for every letter sent. The use of mobile phones and e-mail means that five million fewer letters were sent in 2007 than a year before. The £22 billion pension scheme has a black hole exceeding £7 billion, which taxpayers will now underwrite. Industrial action had become far too common. There is no gainsaying Hooper's damning conclusion: the Royal Mail is antiquated and “untenable” in its current form. The promise to deliver any letter anywhere in the country for a single price - which began in 1840 with the founding of the penny post - is no longer feasible without serious reform.

The search will now begin for the right minority partner. The Business Secretary said that the Dutch company TNT had expressed an interest. TNT already collects more than a billion items of mail in Britain every year, including all BT bills and statements. Since 2006 there has been competition in business mail, although Royal Mail, until yesterday, retained the monopoly over residential mail that was first granted to the Office of Postage by Oliver Cromwell in 1654.

There will, inevitably, be job losses. While that is, of course, regrettable, the trades unions are wrong to demand that employment be guaranteed. They are, however, probably right to see the Hooper recommendations as the first instalment in a gradual privatisation. TNT has an excellent reputation for both reliability and efficiency. If the minority partner outperforms the majority partner, the case for full privatisation will be irresistible. Something of this kind happened in the telecommunications industry where the privatised elements became exemplars for the company as a whole. Indeed, Lord Mandelson hinted at this very thing in a recent speech.

He will face concerted political opposition. The Postal Services Act 2000 introduced limited market liberalisation. But the settlement hammered out with the trade unions at Warwick in 2005 committed the party to public ownership, a pledge that then appeared in the 2005 general election manifesto. By retaining two thirds of the 540,000 shares that are in his hands, Lord Mandelson will rather speciously claim to have kept to the spirit of this commitment. He also made it clear that the deal would not alter the 11,500 branches of the Post Office network.

In fact, in his previous spell in his current job, in 1998, Peter Mandelson was a strong advocate of bringing in the private sector. He now has one third of what he wants. He should be bold in pursuing the rest. Universal services are effectively guaranteed by regulation in gas and electricity. Competition in the provision of gas and electricity has brought down costs and prices to the consumer. A universal service has been guaranteed by strong regulation. There is no reason at all why the same model cannot ultimately apply to the delivery of the mail.