Parcelforce 'Clearance fee'

isplumm

evil_ed wrote: »

last thing tandymalbot , the senior counsel said "For
the avoidance of doubt I have never pleaded that the Postal Services Act
does not apply to Royal Mail Group Ltd." this may be true, but did she actually say that that it does apply to royal mail group ltd and that it applies to every single company within rm group? no! I think a senior counsel can word things better than you or i .mail services have to abide by international mail laws however., courier is not mail and until we join offcom we have not got a watchdog and if we could be classed as mail do you not think we would have been over seen by postwatch
so long forever
your faithful follower and admirer
Evil Ed
caveat emptor

EvilEd .... been busy over the last few days ... but tandymalbot quoting tiny bits out of letters from a RM lawyer, without putting them in context just doesn't make sense ... I pointed out that maybe the reason they paid was because of the cost of going to court ... if they defend an action, then they need expensive lawyers (@ £1000+) .... I was basically told I didn't know what I was talking about ... yet in my job I have used lawyers on numerous occassions ... from simple checking contracts to taking suppliers to court ... some of the senor counsel we used were charging up to £2000 a day ... so I still think that RM paid up because it was just NOT worth the effort of going to court ... for how much .... £20 ... £50 ... don't know, cause I can not see it in tandymalbot postings?

Mark

tandymalbot

isplumm wrote: »

EvilEd .... been busy over the last few days ... but tandymalbot quoting tiny bits out of letters from a RM lawyer, without putting them in context just doesn't make sense ... I pointed out that maybe the reason they paid was because of the cost of going to court ... if they defend an action, then they need expensive lawyers (@ £1000+) .... I was basically told I didn't know what I was talking about ... yet in my job I have used lawyers on numerous occassions ... from simple checking contracts to taking suppliers to court ... some of the senor counsel we used were charging up to £2000 a day ... so I still think that RM paid up because it was just NOT worth the effort of going to court ... for how much .... £20 ... £50 ... don't know, cause I can not see it in tandymalbot postings?

Mark

I don't want to seem condescending but Parcel Force don't have a reciprocal agreement with USPS, Royal Mail (aka the normal post does). Conveniently however Royal mail group ltd gets Parcel Force to deliver these parcels and charge the fee, because Royal Mail (aka post man) would be subject to postwatch (not offcom tv and phone like you mumble!!) regulator. Parcel force is a private courier and therefore they are deliberately and obviously trying to avoid this. Of course they will settle out of court without admission of liability but I have never seen a company so scared of it getting to the small claims, which in any case is binding for me only as a unique feature of small claims. So why were they so worried? Evil ed is trying to say DHL will deliver parcels for USPS next... And why should the poster pay £8 or £13.50 when its unlawful and a unreasonable profiteering charge?

"who do you think prints the advice letters off and puts them in envelopes" a machine does this so dont try and make people believe your charge is justifiable with more nonsense misinformation and Royal Mail could scan the status as something other than what is not, i.e. sent an exortionate illegal letter rather than 'attempted delivery'. If the USA seller found out what was really going on, they would hound USPS and who in turn would hound Parcel Force. And no offence I don't work in a call centre - a little point to think about: who delivers this customs letter? Royal Mail, but how does Parcel Force pay them?

isplumm

Milesy wrote: »

I phoned the Glasgow office this morning and just simply stated. I will pay the C&E charge, but not your clearance fee, to which the girl replied, ok that is fine, but we will send you a bill by post for the charge. I will phone you back. If any postage bill comes though it will be getting binned.

Why???

You didn't pay the right customs on it ... so you caused ParcelForce extra work ... so why should they be out of pocket ....

My attitude is that customs should hold it until you pay, then they will charge you for the storage, the handling, the extra paperwork, etc .... I bet it is a LOT more than PF are asking for?? Then it is nothing to do with PF.

Mark

isplumm

USPS do NOT change the status. Royal Mail change the status. USPS are not happy about this. Sure, Royal Mail may do this a 2am in the morning. But they don't attempt to deliver the parcel. They also pass parcels to Parcel Force as a vain attempt to claim that the Act doesn't apply to them.

Now I understand we are talking about Parcel Force NOT RM?

At 2AM PF I assume will send a message to say they have recieved item or something ... so the message then appears on the UPS website as "Attempted Delivery Abroad" - is that correct?

If this is the case, then why are you suggesting that PF are updating the UPS system ... it is UPS doing this ... PF have no control over a foreign website? PF may send a code or a message to UPS ... but that might be 1234 ... no idea .... then UPS will convert that according to a list they have ... I assume that you must have spoken to someone senior in USA UPS to know that they are not happy with PF sending this message?

I don't know the RM / PF business as well as EvilEd ... but if it is anything like DHL, they have an International company who will deal with all customs material / handling etc, before injecting the item into DHL UK Domestic. They are separate legal entities (but both UK companies)

Mark

isplumm

tandymalbot wrote: »

I don't want to seem condescending but Parcel Force don't have a reciprocal agreement with USPS, Royal Mail (aka the normal post does). Conveniently however Royal mail group ltd gets Parcel Force to deliver these parcels and charge the fee, because Royal Mail (aka post man) would be subject to postwatch (not offcom tv and phone like you mumble!!) regulator. Parcel force is a private courier and therefore they are deliberately and obviously trying to avoid this. Of course they will settle out of court without admission of liability but I have never seen a company so scared of it getting to the small claims, which in any case is binding for me only as a unique feature of small claims. So why were they so worried? Evil ed is trying to say DHL will deliver parcels for USPS next... And why should the poster pay £8 or £13.50 when its unlawful and a unreasonable profiteering charge?

"who do you think prints the advice letters off and puts them in envelopes" a machine does this so dont try and make people believe your charge is justifiable with more nonsense misinformation and Royal Mail could scan the status as something other than what is not, i.e. sent an exortionate illegal letter rather than 'attempted delivery'. If the USA seller found out what was really going on, they would hound USPS and who in turn would hound Parcel Force. And no offence I don't work in a call centre - a little point to think about: who delivers this customs letter? Royal Mail, but how does Parcel Force pay them?

No ... of course you didn't mean to be conseding !!! What .... :mad:

Quite simply EvilEd & I will never agree with you .... we've tried to explain why believe the charge is reasonable & why PF / RM never took you to court ... we disagree .... lets call it quits ... because quite simply I can not bothered ...

As to your comment about not at working call centre ... hmmm ... exciting ... so what??? Customs letter delivered by RM ... shock horror ... so that means customs admin fee unjust ??? Sorry you lost me ... did it have a stamp on it or was it franked ... or did it not a stamp on at all ... whichever way ... they will have had to pay for ... they are a separate legal entity ... under the same group !! I don't understand your point??

Mark

isplumm

evil_ed wrote: »

also tandymalbot, what are you talking about when you say rm hands the parcel to us, this, you are very mistaken about. the parcel never enters royal mail hands. usps takes the parcels in the export bags from heathrow airport, london airmail unit(lamu) and transports them directly to coventry international hub, (parcelforce not royalmail) and the parcels are then officially handed over to parcelforce where each individual parcel is scanned in to our service and are automatically generated a british tracking number. up to now it is standard throughout the world. the parcel is then randomly sent to customs for checking or if the import docs are incorrect or incomplete then these are sent to customs also, the incomplete or incorrectly labelled parcels are automatically automatically flagged up by us customs advising our customs to look at the parcel according to our laws.
never in all of these processes do royalmail touch the parcels., if they did, the size restrictions for parcels entering the uk through parcelforce would be 1.05m in length or 2m in length and girth combined also the parcel would not exceed 10kg as these are royalmail restrictions according to the machinery they use. it is because the parcels never reach royalmail services that we can import heavier and bigger parcels.
the only time a parcel may enter another royalmail group service, is if it gets taken to a post office after a failed delivery attempt but again the parcel has to be within royalmail size restrictions.
until you know what you are talking about, please say nothing as you are looking foolish to those of us who know how the system works.

must say it's been a good laugh at you(sorry with) you but have to go now because i know now that you cannot be educated but will keep coming up with an infinite amount of stupid statements which have neither been investigated nor thought about. Its like a child saying "but why, but why, but why". it gets tedious after a while and no matter how much fun can be poked at an individual, it soon gets boring
ever tried googling the answers you need rather than thinking to yourself "that sounds plausible so that must be true" it might sound plausible to a layman or someone not trained in the services but to those who know what they are talking about, you just sound stupid.

my advise to anyone following this discussion thread, take no notice of tandymalbot or of me. look the answers you wish on the official websites, hmrc.gov.uk parcelforce.com oft.gov.uk opsi.gov.uk and sitpro.org.uk obviously these all begin with www. but i cannot post the full addresses in this thread. but see all the information first hand and read it all, not just the bits you think apply to you and don't let anyone tell you certain bits don't apply, they all do but in the case of the legallity of holding a parcel, even the mail can with held if full postage has not been paid
good luck in your investigations and always remember, you have the right of appeal within 30 days

Tandymalbot .... are you saying that EvilEd doesn't know what is talking about ... as he says UPS pass the items to Parcelforce ... not RM

Look at the Royal Mail Group website ...

Royal Mail is our letters and packages business, covering the whole of the UK for our one-price-goes-anywhere universal service. Each working day we collect items directly from our 113,000 post boxes, 14,300 Post Office® branches and from some 87,000 businesses. These items pass through our network of 70 mail centres, 8 regional distribution centres (for customer sorted mail) and 3,000 delivery offices. Then our fleet of over 30,000 red vehicles and 33,000 bicycles help us to deliver them to their final destination

Parcelforce Worldwide is our express parcels business. We deliver around 150,000 parcels a day to our customers.

In the last few years Parcelforce Worldwide has successfully turned around its business and is now a key player in the competitive, unregulated, express parcels market. It has dramatically cut its losses from operations and continues to improve the quality of service provided for customers, particularly for its time-critical products.

RM deliver packets & letters upto a certain size & weight ... I think < 350gms ... PF deliver anything above that. If you item was less than 350gms, then it would have cleared customs while with PF ... RM have no experience / facilities for doing this .... once it has been cleared by PF it will be injected into the RM system for delivery over the last mile ... that is standard practise .... this is exactly what TNT do .... they pickup from businesses & will inject into RM for the last mile.

If your parcel has been delivered by PF, then RM will have nothing to do with it ... what makes you believe differently????

Mark

tandymalbot

Imported parcels with the Royal Mail customs fees of £8 or £13.50 are subject to the Postal Services Act, even if Parcel Force delivers them. In carrying out this function, they are not unregulated in terms of the Postal Services Act 2000 and therefore they are not allowed to hold parcels in lien.

In fact, when I queried the charge Parcel Force themselves pointed me towards the Successor Postal Services Company Overseas Parcel Post Scheme 2001 (section 9) and Successor Postal Services Company Overseas Letter Post Scheme 2001 (section 15(3))*, as written in my original posting. I do not have time to debate this issue further and do not see the merits of doing so. If you have been charged the fee, take them to small claims and you will get it back as they have collected it illegally (this ignores the fact it is not reasonable either, but this is secondary).

* royalmail.com/portal/rm/content1?catId=400147&mediaId=400283
comes under the heading of Postal Services Act 2000

Certain Royal Mail products or services have the charges, terms and conditions detailed in documents called ‘Schemes’. These Schemes are published under the Postal Services Act 2000 and mean that it is not necessary for Royal Mail to have individual contracts with each and every customer purchasing these products or using these services. These Schemes have been amended and updated a number of times since they were first published and the original Schemes and all the amendments are published in the official journals, the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes which are available from HMSO or gazettes-online.co.uk Royal Mail has consolidated each of the Schemes with all of the amendments (as updated from time to time) and made them available to you to download here as PDF files:

Milesy

isplumm wrote: »

Why???

You didn't pay the right customs on it ... so you caused ParcelForce extra work ... so why should they be out of pocket ....

My attitude is that customs should hold it until you pay, then they will charge you for the storage, the handling, the extra paperwork, etc .... I bet it is a LOT more than PF are asking for?? Then it is nothing to do with PF.

Mark

Where did I say that I did not pay the right customs charge?

The item I purchased was correctly declared, and all the proper prices were declared on the package coming from the other side (states). So what extra work did I cause "Parcelforce" ? I paid my customs and excise charge. I did not pay Parcelforce a fee because I have already paid postage (including the domestic transit), so I am not paying a secondary charge for them doing absolutely nothing to earn it (in my opinion).

Everyone thought the banks were right because "all the banks done it". Same applies here. Did your mother never tell you when you were young "just because the other kids are doing it does not make it right"

Milesy

Also. Just a note. Surely I am in my rights to request a breakdown of what was done for this extra charge under the Freedom of Information Act. And I mean a exact breakdown.

evil_ed

have enjoyed this debate!!! all i can say is appeal to hmrc if you think you have been unfairly charged. now off to work to advise people how to appeal and what their rights are.
still wondering how far globaluk got with his prosecution!!! lol

bye