Stop Royal Mail Handling Fee for HMRC customs charges! 5 July 2014 at 12:28PM in Campaigns corner 19 replies 15.3K views

barncopxx

malcolmchisholm, you have been refunded your VAT (good news) but Royal Mail (a third party) has still had to handle and administer your item on behalf of HMRC, so unless HRMC refunds the handling fee to you or Royal Mail to pass onto you then you won't get it back. Could you name another company who would do the work for someone else for nothing?

System

£8 is daylight robbery

custardy

berbastrike wrote: »

£8 is daylight robbery

What should it be?

stoatwblr

Buzby wrote: »

The £8 fee is the cheapest available from any carrier.

Actually it's not. At least one of them has a fee of 1.5%, capped at £15

I wouldn't let Parcel Farce touch my mail anyway. Too many instances of stuff not arriving, arriving damaged or arriving someplace completely unconnected with the destination.

There are worse companies for deliveries, but I won't use them either.

bdublu

The Royal Mail are not working for nothing!

Under the UPU international agreement the Royal Mail are already getting paid part of the fee charged for posting items from the country it was posted from - paid by you, your supplier, friend or family. This extra £8 charge is an unfair hidden extra charge for doing a job they have already made an international agreement to be paid to do.

Countries that signed the Universal Postal Constitution agree to
accept mail from other countries and to deliver the international
mail to its final destination. Member countries also are obligated
to move each other's mail through its territory and to exchange
international mail where direct transportation or political relations
do not exist. For example, although the U.S. government does not
have diplomatic relations with the Cuban government, an American
resident can send a letter to a Cuban resident. Letter mail to Cuba
transits through Canada and Mexico.

The Universal Postal Convention defines (1) general guidelines on
international postal service and (2) regulations on the operations of
letter post mail. These include the rates (called "terminal dues")
that countries pay each other compensation for processing and
delivering inbound mail, the methods of calculating and collecting
terminal dues, the maximum and minimum weights, the size limits of letter post mail, and the conditions of acceptance.

Interestingly Royal Mail also do not want the public to know how much they are profiting from this hidden charge every year...
Go to: whatdotheyknow website and search for royal mail handling fee

It's an illegal wrong charge. They do not have a contract with either the sender or the receiver of the items and this charge could be challenged in law. They are only getting away with it as no one would take them to court over £8.

A class action may work but again hard to organise.

Grrrrrr

Buzby

Feeling better?

The fee is reasonable and is still the cheapest of the main carriers. Unless you have your own import agent then pay up and smile, or stop importing if you dislike paying UK import taxes. It remains your choice.

antrobus

bdublu wrote: »

....Under the UPU international agreement the Royal Mail are already getting paid part of the fee charged for posting items from the country it was posted from - paid by you, your supplier, friend or family. This extra £8 charge is an unfair hidden extra charge for doing a job they have already made an international agreement to be paid to do.....

Err, no.

Under the "UPU international agreement" the Royal Mail are allowed to charge a customs clearance fee based on the "actual costs of the operation".

http://www.upu.int/uploads/tx_sbdownloader/actInFourVolumesParcelPostManualEn.pdf

barncopxx

bdublu, the way I read your quotation is that RM agree under this contract to process and deliver international items for an agreed fee. But this would quite obviously be conditional that the sender pays the correct price to send the item in the first place. So if a parcel once in the system is subsequently intercepted by Customs officials and found to have contents in it that renders the original price paid too low and therefore incorrect then that parcel is in contravention to the contract. Additional administration work is then required by RM to process, collect and forward the shortfall of monies to HMRC which they wouldn't have to do if the correct price had been paid in the first place so they are quite entitled to make a charge for this extra service.

jjlandlord

makfai wrote: »

It seems a bit odd that a normal VAT registered trader is unable to levy a handling fee each time his business collects VAT from a customer but the parcel deliverer can.

Of course he can: That's called setting the price of whatever he sells.