A huge Royal Mail exposè is coming...

[Skimm]

I saw my postie today after not seeing one for weeks and asked whats been happening with the mail recently. He took out his ear phones and wouldn't stop talking.

He said that its chaos at the depot, they are being giving thousand of letter to post and when you complain they say ai don't care what you do with them, dont bring them back.

They are also being told to prioritize parcels and that letters aren't important. People are quiting or going off sick so the RM are having to hire agency workers who are dumping letters in bushes and quiting within days.

I haven't had post in over 3 week. I have only noticed as I'm waiting to recieve 2 v.important letters that were sent 3 and 2 weeks ago. So who knows how long its been going on.

I have phoned the help line and been told that 50% off the staff in my local depot are either sick or absent and that they have shut down certain postcodes to deliveries. They said after the complaint I will recieve post within 72hr. It never happened and I've had to complain again.

If you search online you will see I'm not the only one. It seems to be happening nationwide in cities and rural areas. The issue is that RM are denying that there is an issue.

They are suppose to deliver post to every postcode Monday to Saturday and now I've been told that they are closing down certain postcodes over the phone but then denying it on social media.

I still didn't get my mail today so I'm starting to wonder if I'm one if the people whobhave had their letters dumped.

My NHS app says I have an appointment and I need to call to conform but doesn’t say when the appointment is. When I call the switch board they say they can’t see it on their system, so chances are I have either missed it already or there’s a mistake. When I call the department where my appointment is no one answers the phone, it’s causing me a lot of stress because it’s a procedure to rule out cancer before I have a big surgery, without having it my surgery will be delayed.

A lot of older people rely on paper appointments because they don’t use online appointments or apps.

Perhaps people were confused by Consignia.

The issuers of fines will either have to find a different way of sending them or they will have to increase the time to pay if RM does not have to deliver every day.

That is bad of your NHS trust. I have never had an issue with a hospital appointment.

Yes, not everyone can have a app but I think that is why they always send a text about appointments first.

Small comfort for people taken to court because they did not respond to a notice they never received.

But @IMustDoMoreExercise not everything can be sent via a tracked service. What about all the big companies like Moonpig, Funkypigeon, Thortful and then all the smaller independent businesses on Etsy and Not on the High Street that rely on sending their products as a letter? People are being too literal about the terminology of 'letter'.

For products of this size, there is no alternative. From my experience customers will not pay higher prices to have their item sent with a tracking number. Are we all meant to go out of business because everything should be 'digitised'??

Something needs to change but removing the need for letter sized items will cause so many problems. I'm not against streamlining processes and modernising things but this is not just about physical letters.

I'm waiting for my marriage cert, the council have said I can't go to the office and pick it up it has to be posted..
Can't change my name or anything without it

I know that it will not be easy, but we can't carry on as we are.

It is simply not economical for RM to have to deliver 6 days a week to every single address.

Other countries have adapted and we will have to. There is really no alternative. If people knew that they would be guaranteed a delivery, say, 2 or 3 times a week on set days then we could work around it. At the moment, it is all up in the air and no-one knows if and when they will receive any post which is worse for retailers.

We've had 3 letters on different days this week all addressed to the same number in the High Street but not the same village.

Or other companies will develop a product for letters too and they’ll deliver everyday, just like they do fir packages.
At which point RM will loose even more customers…. whilst other companies will make it profitable.

The answer to ‘im struggling to deliver the product I’ve sold’ isn’t always to deliver a subpar product.

You have my sympathies, there are four dwellings with my house number and street name - each has a different postcode but any postie seeking to shorten their round gives them all to me as access is more difficult to the other three.
There are probably thousands of people who are particularly unlucky in that the usually unique 'house number & postcode' relate to several properties.

When I get a letter not addressed to me, unless it is addressed to an immediate neighbour I post it back in the postbox with a written note on the front, “delivered to the wrong address - please try again.” I’ve had post addressed to me that is addressed to somewhere 20 miles away before and I am not willing to deliver that for the Royal Mail when they are the ones being paid to do it.

Many people don't know this, and Royal Mail try to scare people out of doing it because they lose out financially, but almost all stamp dealers sell valid first and second class stamps at below face value. This is completely legitimate and totally different from people on Ebay selling dodgy recycled stamps.
The reason that stamp dealers can do this is that most have massive stocks at the moment having exchanged all their old stamps to the barcoded versions, and they buy up old collections at a fraction of their value.
https://www.discountedstamps.co.uk/product-category/1st-class-stamps
http://www.rushstamps.co.uk (postage offers on left hand side)
https://www.philatelink.co.uk/1st-class-and-2nd-class-nvi-discounted-stamps-30-c.asp

I sell a lot of stuff on eBay, and this saves about 25% on postage costs. No-one who buys more than about ten stamps a year (which is less and less of us admittedly) should actually pay full price for stamps. I've only included companies I've actually used but there are many more.

There really won't be any other company who can deliver letters to every single address 6 days a week for £1.25. It is not economically viable with the low volumes of letters sent nowadays.

Not all areas have NHS apps either (perhaps it varies by trust?) My dentist will text me, but the hospital certainly uses letters (although will phone or email for very short notice appointments, but I think that’s down to individual secretaries).
I would rather have guaranteed mail three days a week (perhaps Monday, Wednesday, Friday for one side of town and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday for the other) than the uncertainty we have just now.

It's certainly happening on my street, we can go over a week without any letters being delivered. I got a letter delivered yesterday about a hospital appointment that I had a week ago. Luckily the hospital had phoned me, so I didn't miss it. I think it should be renationalised, but in the absence of anything changing in the near future, organisations like the NHS that rely on the post, will need to find another way of working. Have there been any examples where privatisation has actually worked for anyone other than shareholders?

My mum (85 with alzheimers) is waiting for 2 hospital appointments. There doesn't appear to be an option to get them emailed to one of us - we'll need to take her, she won't remember why she's therefore anything they tell her. It's possible to get her details linked to my NHS app so I can see the appointments on line. Except her GP practice isn't responding to my emails requesting this. So I need to try and phone and explain. Which I have to do while I'm at work. Between the chances of RM not delivering an appointment letter and mum throwing it away it's all a but stressful..

That's just stupid. No doubt a post-covid thing, where they've decided not to reopen their offices to the public.

I have access to my mum's emails - I've just got the account logged in on my laptop, so if she wants me to look at something, or reply to something for her, I can.

She doesn't have dementia, but sometimes she likes me to check things.

Could you do that too?

Mum doesn't have an email account

I would respectfully disagree. But only because I believe that post should never have been privatised in the first place. If they hadn't done that, then the Royal Mail would have a lot more mail to deliver. Very few other countries in the world have privatised their mail service. I think it was a mistake.

People would not have sent more letters if the service was still in public ownership.

I am old enough to remember when you had to wait for months to have a phone line put in before British Telecom was privatised. Public ownership is not always good.

Does the PO still do what it used to do at Christmas, taking on students for the festive period. I did it one year and ever since have had a huge respect for posties

The fact you had to wait years fir a tel line had nothing to do with private/public.
It was simply a new technology that took time to be set up. Just like having internet fibre broadband has now.

And no people wouldn’t send more letters now. It doesn’t mean it’s ok for RM to offer a crap service. Delivery everyday was part of their specifications. Up to them to either renegotiate said contract agreement or provide the service. That’s what I expect from any other private company.
And if they can’t Wo going bust, then they were not fit to be in business and another company should take over.

Not sure why we should expect crap service from RM when we would never accept from any other company.

They are greedy grifters doing the usual trash a business by privatising. The posties have long flagged up this drive to save costs at expense of service, wages & conditions. But as long as The Shareholders get their pound of flesh, who cares eh. RM statement to the Times is nonsense. The parcel priority is cos they can't organise a wedding in a church & think the same uk race to the bottom- fire & rehire on lousy temp hourly gig contracts, is the way. We need to end this bent capitalism.