Stuart Baker at East Oxford sorting office during the Christmas rush last year Postal workers in Oxford, who last year delivered one of the worst services to customers in the country, have each received a £1,000 reward after national profits rocketed.

A year on from the crippling strike in the city, independent figures for the Royal Mail show 90.9 per cent of first class letters arrived the next day in the OX postcode region.

The target figure for the region was 91 per cent. The average success rate for the year was just 85.6 per cent.

Royal Mail spokesman Dan Panes said: "These are good, positive figures. It would have been almost mathematically impossible to achieve target after the bad start, but in quarter four we were only 0.1 per cent away."

Now almost 2,000 permanent Oxfordshire staff, including managers, will receive £1,074 each.

Kevin Duffy, spokesman for the Communications Workers Union in Oxford, said: "We definitely deserve the bonus. I fail to see how a strike which happened a year ago has anything to do with performance now which is definitely improving."

Nationally, Royal Mail also failed to meet its target for the year of 92.5 per cent next day first class deliveries. The national average success rate for the past year was 91.4 per cent.

Royal Mail was unable to provide a league table of performance rates, but a spokesman admitted that the OX region would be among the worst performers thanks to the "appalling" figures in the first three months caused by the strike and general reorganisation when the figure slumped to 68 per cent.

Mr Panes said: "The bonus payment is based on finances not efficiency. In the past year we have seen a turnaround in which Royal Mail has gone from a loss of £365m -- or £1m a day -- to a profit of £500m."

General manager for the OX postcode region, Michael Stockdale, said: "These latest figures show a massive improvement and illustrate the huge effort staff and managers in the area have made to improve things after a disappointing start to the last financial year.

"We suffered from the hangover of our April, May and June performance for the whole of the financial year -- despite us delivering almost 91 per cent of first class mail to customers on time for the remaining nine months of the year."

Oxford postman David Hayes said: "I don't know what bonus we'll get after tax but we definitely deserve it. They moved the Headington office in January but we are working our socks off all the same."

Kay Hogg, 28, of Abingdon Road, Oxford, contacted the Oxford Mail in March, when she received a television licence reminder addressed to a house four doors away and a birthday card from mid-January had not arrived by the beginning of February.

She now believes the city's postal service has improved.

"I'm happy to say there has been an improvement in the postal service," she said. "There hasn't been anything that has gone missing recently."

But city councillor for Headington, Stephen Tall, said: "I think saying the postal service has improved would provoke a hollow laugh from most people in Headington.

"We had the unfortunate prosecution of one local postman and that combined with the imminent closure of our sorting office means there are just lots of problems with the Royal Mail."

Headington's sorting office in Lime Walk is due to close next month.

He said: "If the postal service is getting better it is a slight recovery from what was a very poor service."