Royal Mail - not even garbage service

Chief_of_Staffy

Because to provide a garbage service, you have to provide a service. Neither I nor anybody on the street has received any mail for at least two weeks. People are waiting on bank cards, hospital appointment letters, letters from abroad - nothing. The Royal Mail have decided they simply can't be bothered to deliver. They don't collect either. Book and pay for a collection and they ignore it. Rebook and they ignore it again, and again.

When you eventually manage to find the complaint form, you submit it and get a reply which makes no mention whatsoever of your complaint, stating, 'We aim to deliver to all addresses we have mail for, six days a week'. Phew, that's alright then.

Followed by, 'If you've contacted us about a specific item, we hope it's now been received. If not, there's still time for it to be delivered and we thank you for your patience at this time.'

'If'? Did they not bother to read my complaint? The contempt these people have for their customers is something else.

Furthermore, it is utterly meaningless. Still time for what to be delivered, where? At what point will there not be 'still time'? And since no item has been specified, how do they even know? Are these people actual morons?

They have a status page where they list postcodes of areas experiencing 'delays'. However, it appears that several weeks without mail doesn't constitute a delay, so our postcode is not even listed.

So there you go. I need to finish up this post now and go get a refund from Amazon for a purchase which the Royal Mail sorting office have likely chucked in the bin along with the hundreds of other items they have illegally failed to deliver.

dnpark38

All year I have only had one delivery per week of a bunch of envelopes all dated 2 to 3 weeks earlier.

This is the normal through out my area.

The King should stop Royal Mail being called ROYAL.

Woodstok2000

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82130130#Comment_82130130

As the head of a vast enterprise populated by out-of-touch, overprivileged ex public schoolboys, sucking up vast amounts of public money and delivering very little in return, I think the King is probably on their side

Albermarle

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82130130#Comment_82130130

It seems to be a very regional problem. Where I live we get a delivery nearly every day. Expected Parcelforce items arrive approx on time etc.

Purple_Jumper

Royal Mail delivery is pretty disastrous where I live too. Yesterday, we received a letter from the Office of the Public Guardian about a Lasting Power of Attorney dated 5th August, stating we had 3 weeks from that date to object!

elsien

I’m impressed you managed to find a complaints form. I couldn’t find the version I used to use, I could only find the phone number and I’ve decided after a 40 minute wait they don’t actually have anyone answering the phone, it’s just a ruse to make it look like they are doing something.

strawb_shortcake

The post by us is awful, we're getting post once a fortnight but one street haven't had post for 2 months and are being told if they want their post they have to collect between 8-10am.

daveyjp

Over the last three months I have become very aware of the Royal Mail operations from a friend who took a job as a postie.

The issues are because they are a company with multiple obligations that are no longer fit and proper. It worked when there were 20bn plus items to deliver a year (and most addresses had a few regular items over a week), now it is about 4bn the model just doesn't work. This has been coupled with an increase in parcels which are bulkier and take longer to deliver. They take priority as the depots don't have room to store parcels for a few days.

Also look at letters and see if they are from third party bulk mailing houses. They can hold mail for days before sending to Royal Mail for final mile delivery for the same reason, not enough letters to an area to justify a delivery,

In the end it will come down to how much are you willing to pay to guarantee an important letter arrives within 24 hours?

Brie

In our (any many other areas) there's two types of delivery. There's parcels, which are priortised and delivery promptly. Any then there's other post. This is not prioritised, it's not delivered in the timescales we used to expect and fails in it's service to recipients.

Royal Mail has a staff crisis. People don't want to be paid minimum wage to walk 12 miles a day in any weather and be abused by customers. Frankly I don't blame them. So every area is short staffed (unless they are very lucky) which means that normal deliver doesn't happen, and when a regular dependable postie is off sick or on holiday there is no one to replace him.

Our very nice postie who occasionally delivers has nicely suggested that if we ring the local office our post will be bundles up as a parcel and delivered within a day or two.

Meanwhile many people in the area miss vital news including NHS appointments.

dnpark38

As I said one delivery per week.

The postman daily is sat in the passenger seat of the van that daily delivers parcels.

soolin

There is a thread running on the ebay sub board on MSE as I too have serious issues with Royal mail. For me it is mainly the outgoing post going missing at a worryingly large percentage number, but as many of the comments above it has also affected incoming post.

In the past year we've travelled to hospitals for appointments only to find they have been cancelled- with letters arriving several days later , I've lost ordinary things like cards from relatives. It has got to the stage that when I send cards I now phone the recipient a few days after to see if they have actually arrived, and I have friends and relatives do that to me as me.

My parcel post though is usually very good - although we did have issues with a suspected thief 2 years ago when we had a relief temporary postperson with items showing as delivered to an address some distance away and RM refusing to do anything about it - I actually went as far as issuing an LBA .

My usual postman is absolutely wonderful though, I cannot praise him enough but he says the work load is increasing with management not really understanding the system as many haven't ever started off at entry jobs, and have come straight in from other industries.