Anyone else on the forum experiencing problems with their mail? For the last few weeks our post has only been delivered on one day each week ( Tuesday). This obviously affects anyone waiting for important letters for doctor’s appointments etc. Royal Mail have also chosen to seal up many of our local postboxes in preparation for the new digital postboxes coming soon. I suppose if we can’t post our Xmas post they can’t be fined for any delays.
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Personally I think Royal Mail’s main problem is that there is relatively little actual letter post now and it’s very hard to size a business to do nothing much most of the year and cope with a big rush at Christmas.
They do deliver an awful lot of parcels throughout the year, so the basic service is in place. If profits weren’t flowing out of the country into the pockets of a Czech billionaire there would be more to fund a better service. How on earth can it be right that our Royal Mail is foreign owned?
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I had a chat with our Postman today. He is working six days a week at the moment and are just about coping. However, he said our nearest city, 10 miles away, are in a mess as they can’t find staff. I won’t comment on my views on this.
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Parcel delivery is a whole different business model than letter post. They have a huge amount of competition, which forces them to be good at it.
Anyway we are at risk of getting too near politics. So I’m ducking out of this discussion now!
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Mrs HH and I spent much of Sunday out on our bikes delivering all our local letters. We are a very efficient postal service. We didn’t get any tips, but we did end up in the pub.
As to the Royal Mail service here, it’s excellent and we get plenty of deliveries. I expect it various around the country, so people in more sparsely populated places get fewer deliveries. But that may be wrong of course.
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Contact your MP is your first port of call, don’t try and ring customer care to make a complaint as you will be waiting ages to actually get though and talk to someone who will then spin you the company line, we are very busy etc etc, most delivery offices, and this has been going on for a long time staff are told to leave mail, parcels take priority, RM management will deny this, but ask any postie and he will confirm the above.
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Absolutely. I worked as a postie for 10 years. When I first joined there were proper full time jobs 37 hours per week. There were enough staff to cover sickness and absences. Managers used to come and do random spot checks to ensure that all mail had been taken out. If I had accidentally left a single letter in my frame it would constitute a warning and repeat offences could lead to disciplinary action.
After privatisation it was all about saving money. They stopped handing out full time contracts and aimed to make the job part time.
The current mess is due to not having enough staff to cover any sickness or cover the hours required to deliver everything in busy times.
Hence mail is left to stack up in delivery offices with nobody able to deliver it.
Quite shambolic sadly.
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Cobblers.
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For about two decades to be fair. Inevitable consequence of the endless drive to get more for less. Always gets you less.
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Traffic is a lot less than previous years, it’s a business decision to do away with the service, even how RM handle parcels is not in the same league as Amazon.
My recollection is not great, but … I thought the government had prescribed Royal Mail functionality and performance standards when it was privatised. If so, isn’t it about time that these were audited and appropriate action taken.
If no such functionality or performance standards were ever set, was that a mistake ?
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Maybe the bar was set too low?
Incredibly difficult for Royal Mail to deliver post competitively I think and the cost of stamps seems very high as we’re so used to ‘free/subsidised’ delivery of parcels from Amazon etc.
There are performance standards and the company hasn’t kept to any of them since the strikes in 2021, hence the constant fines, RM is supposed to be a 24/7 service, but as @Premmyboy has already said, most new starters have been on part time contracts, why, it saves money.
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Getting back to the question asked by the OP, yes our deliveries in the last 10 days have been very sporadic - one delivery every 3-4 days instead of the usual reliable daily one. As suggested, it may well be inadequate staffing levels compounded by the Christmas rush. This is very poor, especially when the cost of a stamp is now so high.
And no, I don’t think privatisation was a great idea.
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They used to staff up with loads of temps at Christmas. Students etc.
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The cost of 1st class stamps have gone through the roof over the last 4 years, has the service improved, no, 10days to get a letter from less than 4 miles away is not acceptable, N.H.S letters should be kept separate from the normal mail and travel with priority service items which they do in Mail Centres, however your problems start when it lands in the Delivery Office, hence the increase in missed hospital appointments.
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Still do in Mail Centres, but no way near to what they used to in the past, have you seen any temporary staff out on delivery with your posties ? No.
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The main part of our postman’s comment today was that they can’t find staff.
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I was a Christmas postie for a couple of years while at university. It was brilliant. I was paid for five hours and could do the round in about half that time. The regular posties told me not to return to the PO early, or I would lose pay. So I used to go home, play some music at then arrive at the PO at the end of my shift.
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