How can Special Delivery lose passposrts and birth certificates?

Pigus

I am very worried about a package sent SD by my lawyer on May 17th, to the Home Office. It is a citizenship application for an overseas relative in Asia, containing passports and birth certificates, one of which is an irreplaceable 'live birth' certificate.

It has not been signed for by June 5th and there are no web tracking updates after the first entries to say 'Accepted at Post Office' and then 'Sender Preparing item'. My MP has enquired at the Home Office and the individual's application has not been looged, even though it should take less than 2 weeks between receipt and logging onto the system.

The post office are adamant that the driver picked it up and that the whole back office is cleared out and checked for stray packages at the end of every day - my lawyer uses them regularly and has a good relationship with them. The Royal Mail 'escalated' an investigation but have concluded the package is 'lost', with no further explanation. They suggest we make a claim. Of course, we will, to cover costs of getting new passaports and a copy of a civil regsiter birth certificate. But the oroiginal is irreplaceable since it has the new-born's footprint stamped in ink. Sentimental you may say, but not for the mother.

How can a SD package not even get tracked from the post office to the intial mail office, or at other stages of the delivery process? I have read that sometimes packages can invisibly pass through the whole system and arrive ok - because of a dud bar code of non-matching SD reference number, etc. But t would seem that it has not arrived, so I am really wondering .... where on earth did it go, how?

More importantly, I want the Royal Mail / Post Office to actually LOOK FOR IT. I believe all they have done is check if it has turned up at their National Return Centre. Of course, that could take week and months to happen if it has genuinely got mislaid in the system. Is it not possible to get them to check the route along which the package should have passed? Somehow that package should be discoverable - or it has been stolen, in which case the RM should be doubly concerned to investigate.

[Deleted User]

Pigus wrote: »

But the oroiginal is irreplaceable since it has the new-born's footprint stamped in ink. Sentimental you may say, but not for the mother.

Are you sure? I'd have thought it must be sentimental for the mother.

Pigus wrote: »

More importantly, I want the Royal Mail / Post Office to actually LOOK FOR IT. I believe all they have done is check if it has turned up at their National Return Centre. Of course, that could take week and months to happen if it has genuinely got mislaid in the system. Is it not possible to get them to check the route along which the package should have passed? Somehow that package should be discoverable - or it has been stolen, in which case the RM should be doubly concerned to investigate.

They're not going to physically walk the route that it took - they will be checking if they can identify where in the system it got lost, at best.

Best to focus your efforts on getting the application documents replaced.

custardy

Pigus wrote: »

I am very worried about a package sent SD by my lawyer on May 17th, to the Home Office. It is a citizenship application for an overseas relative in Asia, containing passports and birth certificates, one of which is an irreplaceable 'live birth' certificate.

It has not been signed for by June 5th and there are no web tracking updates after the first entries to say 'Accepted at Post Office' and then 'Sender Preparing item'. My MP has enquired at the Home Office and the individual's application has not been looged, even though it should take less than 2 weeks between receipt and logging onto the system.

The post office are adamant that the driver picked it up and that the whole back office is cleared out and checked for stray packages at the end of every day - my lawyer uses them regularly and has a good relationship with them. The Royal Mail 'escalated' an investigation but have concluded the package is 'lost', with no further explanation. They suggest we make a claim. Of course, we will, to cover costs of getting new passaports and a copy of a civil regsiter birth certificate. But the oroiginal is irreplaceable since it has the new-born's footprint stamped in ink. Sentimental you may say, but not for the mother.

How can a SD package not even get tracked from the post office to the intial mail office, or at other stages of the delivery process? I have read that sometimes packages can invisibly pass through the whole system and arrive ok - because of a dud bar code of non-matching SD reference number, etc. But t would seem that it has not arrived, so I am really wondering .... where on earth did it go, how?

More importantly, I want the Royal Mail / Post Office to actually LOOK FOR IT. I believe all they have done is check if it has turned up at their National Return Centre. Of course, that could take week and months to happen if it has genuinely got mislaid in the system. Is it not possible to get them to check the route along which the package should have passed? Somehow that package should be discoverable - or it has been stolen, in which case the RM should be doubly concerned to investigate.

How do you imagine this route? for example,RM has 000's of pieces of rolling stocks. At this point except the very newest,there is no tracking on them.
So which trolley was your item in and where is that trolley now?
Which bag amongst the millions they have was it in?
Unfortunately sometimes items get genuinely lost for various reasons (generally human error on some level)
It may still show up. An SD mistakenly put in with standard mail will not get scanned until someone manually recognises it is an SD and removes it from the manual mail stream into the SD stream.
If for example it got damaged and ended up in the NRC with no barcode. Its a case of waiting until someone opens it and records the details of contents