Fed up with DWP losing your post?

TELLIT01

epitome wrote: »

Royal Mail stopped doing DWP post last year, now it is handled by someone else and sent on by a courier firm, but all are accountable to the DWP, and the DWP is accountable to you and the ICO.

I'm not disputing that DWP is accountable. What I am saying is that sending an item by Recorded Delivery or any other 'signed for' system is absolutely no guarantee that it will get to the intended recipient any faster. The reality is that using such services can actually delay delivery. We were told recently to warn customers not to write anything on reply paid envelopes because this will cause the automatic sort to fail and the envelope will have to be hand sorted. Sounds crazy but that is the official line.

epitome

Ok, but this thread is not about slow delivery times, it is about the far more important issue that the DWP "lose" vast amounts of post.

And their very inadequate response is to tell the customer to "send it again", even when it was signed for delivery and there is evidence that it was delivered.

This thread is to get the DWP to change their working practices, so that atleast when an item is "signed for" they do not tell the customer to send it again...but instead do what they are supposed to do under the DPA and FIND THE DOCUMENT.

Housing_Benefit_Officer

Most 'lost' post isn't lost but sitting in a pile with some poor sod trying to figure out who it belongs to because the item hasn't got a covering letter or a national insurance number written on it. We have a box of items that we haven't a clue who they belong to because they came in without a covering letter. The most common is short birth certificates for a new child but there is no covering letter to enable us to figure out who the parents are.

missapril75

epitome wrote: »

Ok, but this thread is not about slow delivery times, it is about the far more important issue that the DWP "lose" vast amounts of post.

Glad you put that in inverted commas. Post is rarely lost, as such, it's just that there are so many millions of items sent and the stuff not going to your nice local office anymore (and remote storage doesn't help either) that it's not easy to readily lay hands on.

Even in the "good old days" of smaller offices and actual files, stuff was hard to find. The fact that people had a query meant something was active on the file and that meant it wasn't in the alphabetical run, which further meant it was in one of a dozen places in the office and hard to find.

"Paperless" offices makes it even less efficient now.

This thread is to get the DWP to change their working practices, so that atleast when an item is "signed for" they do not tell the customer to send it again...but instead do what they are supposed to do under the DPA and FIND THE DOCUMENT.

Admirable.
Good luck with getting government to put proper funding into the social security system for the first time ever.

TELLIT01

Suggesting that people send copies of 'lost' post will provide a faster resolution in many instances than waiting in often vain hope that the original post will turn up. As HBO said, a lot of post arrives every day without anything to effectively identify the owner. There aren't the resources available to try to link random post.
Please don't suggest that more resources should be provided. It isn't going to happen. Number of staff are constantly being cut. AAs (Admin Assistants) are disappearing very fast and they are the people who historically had responsibility for post when it arrived in the offices.
It's all very well living in the fantasy world where all you have to do is ask and all problems magically disappear. The rest of us will have to carry on in the real one where changes rarely result in improvements.

mrxry

I remember a friend 6 years ago who had his benefit stopped as they claimed he never handed in proof when he left work wrote a letter of complaint and sent it recorded and it was returned as refused delivery and DWP claimed our tracking which said the same didnt prove it was sent to them.

epitome

Tellit01,

The thread is not about obtaining faster resolutions. If the post does not turn up then a complaint to the ICO would be in order.

dori2o

epitome wrote: »

Tellit01,

The thread is not about obtaining faster resolutions. If the post does not turn up then a complaint to the ICO would be in order.

Have you ever seen a Gov departments post room?

I have, I've been working in one for the past 9 months (not working on the post team but at a desk within the post room) and the amount of post they receive just from the mail centre at Liverpool is unbelieveable.

It's quite obvious that due to human error, which happens in every business in the world, some post may be redirected to the wrong department, the wrong building etc. This then takes time to be sent to the correct area which again requires transport through the mail centre if it has been sent to the wrong building.

The other thing that happens is that a person has an allocation of post to clear and then falls ill, has an accident, etc and needs to take time off work. This causs delays as their work unworked post may not immediately be picked up.

Most of the cases which are referred by customers to the ICO, or to MP's etc are not actually resolved any quicker, it's just that in the time taken for the customer to write to their MP or the ICO etc, their post has actually been processed anyway in it's normal way (i.e. in due course) and the customer receives their response within a week or so of them sending in their complaint to the ICO/MP, which in most cases hasn't itself been dealt with.

By all means complain, but in most cases it doesn't make any difference.

HB58

I think the objective is to have enough complaints to get systems changed for the better. If no-one complains then nothing ever gets changed.

missapril75

HB58 wrote: »

I think the objective is to have enough complaints to get systems changed for the better. If no-one complains then nothing ever gets changed.

And it's an admirable objective.

The thing is, people HAVE been complaining about this for decades.
It's not a business where failure to listen and adapt loses customers who go elsewhere. It's a government department that is run on the cheap (inadequate IT systems, poorly trained staff, overworked and unable to keep up with demands etc) and most people don't care as the victims are "just" the unemployed and those seen as not helping themselves. And most people have zero sympathy with the staff who also try to get things improved.

Most people don't want to pay more in taxation to have things run better.