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I live on the edge of Sheffield and no one in our village has had any post this year. I'm currently waiting for my new Sim card and will be without a mobile service if this goes on much longer. God knows what other important post we may be due.
Someone complained to the postman ( who was delivering parcels) and he said they are prioriting parcels and are running 5 days behind.
Is this happening anywhere else?
Also in Sheffield, S7 and our service became noticeably dreadful in December and continues to be. First class letters arriving well over a week late. Only getting one delivery a week. It's pretty woeful.
No problems where I am but I was chatting to a postie from another area who had been away on holiday for a week and none of their round had been delivered in their absence.
Yes it's a mess in rural Calderdale but the snow last week was a huge disruption
Happens here, nothing for days and days, then a big bundle of letters all at once. Parcels pretty much on time, letters very delayed.
We usually get post a couple of times a week (outskirts of Rochdale) and as @kormoran says, it’s usually a big bundle of stuff - apparently this is usual practice.
Parcels is separate from ‘post’ and comes round in a separate van, usually when it’s meant to.
On a tangent, has anyone ever actually seen a RM locker? They’re apparently being rolled out but can’t say I’ve seen one near me…
Yep it's happening all the time in our office so I imagine it's the same all over the country. Since xmas we have still been inundated with parcels and management prioritise them over the mail as more profit is involved and they want to keep overtime to a minimum.
Of course, officially this doesn't happen.
I'm sure that nice Czechian man will get it sorted out!
said they are prioriting parcels
Consider the number of legal, financial and otherwise important documentation that MUST be hardcopy that seems like a dubious decision.
It is crap, and ours have definitely, unofficially, dropped certain days.
Consider the number of legal, financial and otherwise important documentation that MUST be hardcopy that seems like a dubious decision.
Can't think of many TBH. The stuff with most impact, SIM cards and bank cards/PINs are on borrowed time too.
Traffic offence notification and parking fines that have a limited response time. I'm not sure how the legals would work if Royal Mail didn't deliver them in time.
Like i said in my OP, it's been three weeks with no.post now which exceeds the normal response time for early payment of fines etc.
A postie lives in our rd, so he makes sure that we get a weekly post.
An appointment for the hospital came 2 days after the actual date. Luckily rang the hospital due to not hearing anything, who said my appointment was ‘tomorrow’, that was annoying. All appointments now get confirmed by them phoning patients a week beforehand.
As an ex-postie, we were often instructed to prioritise specials and Amazon, everything else could wait. Often our incoming mail wouldn’t arrive until lunchtime, so we’d just do parcels and packets. NHS letters arrived in a separate bundle/easy to identify so they went out straight away.
The hospital appointment thing is nothing new. They are like HMRC in that the letter gets created and printed on a certain date but they don't actually stick it in an envelope and post it for several days. Or that's how it appears to operate.
Last week I got 2 letters from HMRC dated 24th and 25th December. Despite the snow here causing a 1 week delay that is not really that different to the normal service from HMRC.
It's been happening for years. You shouldn't have to do it, but if you go to your delivery office and ask for your mail, you might get the wodge of letters rammed into your address slot on the delivery frame. Of course, if the item you need is still in one of the many boxes hidden under the desk or kicked into a corner, you're sh!t out of luck. Shoddy company, still start simmering when I think about being a postie despite sacking it off in late 2021.
Just another British thing that is broken and will never be the same again. File along with NHS, trains, councils
Yes - problematic post here in Troon / Ayrshire. We tend to get nothing for an age the a bundle of stuff shoved through the letterbox together.
I got a bill, a final demand that bill and a court summons for non payment come through the door on the same day.
Of course you only have any sense of the issue if you know to expect something
We're currently in the process of getting some grant funded insulation work done on our house - which means correspondance from the funding / managing body, from the contractors doing the work, and a body that is monitoring and evaluating the work. Across all three agencies if theres any paperwork to fill out or sign they bring it to the door in person - thats just four or five weeks into the project becuase the post was causing such problems . In the first instance there was a mass mail out inviting residents to take part in the scheme - asking them to opt in but requiring no action to opt out. They now don't know who amongst the non participants have deliberately opted out and who is simply unaware becuase the mail never reached them.
It's down to something called 'lapsing,' where a round doesn't have a specific postie permanently assigned to it. This used to be a short term temporary solution to staff shortage/illness, but has become a permanent tactic to cut costs.
At periodic intervals, all the rounds in a delivery office are reassigned, with posties getting preferential pick based on seniority. The longer serving guys get the easy ones, newbies get the unbalanced leftovers: unrealistic areas with, for example, big new housing developments bolted on making them almost impossible to complete. Such rounds end up orphaned, with no one postie looking after them.
Rather than rotate staff to cover all duties (such that all duties then only fail briefly at intervals), managers at my delivery office seemed to pick particular areas and let them go to hell in a handcart: mail backing up for days or weeks prior to some luckless b@stard being put on punishment detail, firefighting the mountain of mail that'd built up. That's why you'll get big wads of mail at random intervals if you're the lucky person at the sharp end of this practice. Thing is...it was generally areas with a lower socio-economic demographic, i.e. populated by old people, poor people, chaotic families. That is, people who depend on mail but lack the organisation of the pointy elbowed, over entitled middle classes to make official complaints about any lack of service. Deliberate policy? Cynical, moi?
If it's any consolation, it's the same in Ireland right now. Postie came by Tuesday last week with, basically, all the post from the previous 2 weeks; then hasn't been since.
In central Glasgow post often takes a week or more to arrive then a big batch arrives at once. Here. in East Dunbartonshire Mrs IRC has just received, yesterday, a christmas present posted in early December. A parcel. It went from Great Yarmouth via (among other places) Dunoon according to tracking.
Traffic offence notification and parking fines that have a limited response time. I’m not sure how the legals would work if Royal Mail didn’t deliver them in time.
its not entirely new, a couple of years back my (one and only in my lifetime) speeding notification came on the last possible day - was on the mat when I got home, had to send my response first class recorded the following morning. I had a pretty good idea that it was probably coming.
All appointments now get confirmed by them phoning patients a week beforehand.
Putting an extra administrative burden on the stretched NHS to accommodate a different failing service. Brilliant. 🙁
All appointments now get confirmed by them phoning patients a week beforehand.
Putting an extra administrative burden on the stretched NHS to accommodate a different failing service. Brilliant. ?
give it another decade and they might switch to text messages
a piece of paper, with printed information, in an envelope, sent to a sorting office, allocated to the correct route, then hand delivered through a letterbox, taking days or possibly not arriving at all leading to confusion - all to communicate a basic sentence or two's worth of information
With a large letter now costing £2.10 or more first class backed up by an unreliable delivery service, the temptation to just abandon RM and start using courier firms for pretty much everything is growing.
While parcels may currently be more profitable, reliable doorstep delivery of mail is the reason for RM's existence. Without it, they are just another Evri/Yodel, and possibly worse at the job than those.
It's a similar argument with the BBC. The things that make the BBC distinctive are the only reason it deserves protection from the commercial market, and yet the BBC continues to erode that distinctiveness.
Nhs lothian uses secure electronic mailing backed up with auto texts. You can still get snail mail if you prefer. It uses less admin time and costs less if done electronically
reliable doorstep delivery of mail is the reason for RM’s existence.
It's the duty they are saddled with rather than the reason they exist. A situation was created where doorstep delivery was opened up to competition but RMs competitors aren't required to take on any of RM's duties. Non of the parcel delivery companies are required to offer a universal service. But what they can do is cherry pick profitable areas of the market and what they are doing at present is participating in a bloodletting competition between themselves - fighting over the profitable aspects of home delivery by undercutting each other in the hope that they'll be the last man standing. What RM faces is being burdened with the un-profitable but essential elements of home-delivery while what should be the profitable aspect of the service being turned into a loss-leader.
What non of RM's competitors are seeing to do is take RM's place.
According to royalmailchat dot co dot uk unofficial forum for rm employees, RM stopped officially naming depots (including breakdown into postcode areas) with backlogs last Friday. So glad I don't work there any longer, the job changed so much for the worse when the pandemic started and it all became about prioritising specific parcels like the LFT test kits above letters. Since then some duties have been removed in most depots and split between remianing duties, making an impossible workload for the working day even more impossible, so posties often now get told to rotate which sections of their duty don't get letters.
Yep here too. We were told a few months ago by James, our local postie, that they have been told to prioritise parcels 4 days a week and anything else the rest of the time or if they have no parcels left to deliver.
We used to send a lot of our important documents out from work using 1sr class but have now resorted to 2nd as it takes no longer.
Sheffield S6 here and we seem to get a delivery a couple of times a week, if we're lucky.
Getting something that is tracked usually means it comes with a bundle of all the other post from the last few days.
In the royal mails defence...
My parcel was delivered only two weeks after sending.
I mean it was delivered back to me... With half the box missing and the plastic bag used wrap it up after also torn. But you know... take the win...
I had one from the dental surgery during the postal strikes. I'd been waiting ~6 months since the last botched attempt (which was at the end of a about a year being bounced around the emergency and regular dentist) to have a very dead tooth pulled out.
Back to the end of the waiting list for another 6 months ......
Normally I'd have some lefty solidarity with the striking postie or the NHS. But frankly one could have been replaced by the telephone (invented 1861) seeing as all the letter contained was an instruction to call them within 2 weeks. And the other should actually have been modernized and used something cheaper and more efficient than a paper letter.
We still get more post for the previous occupier* of the house than for ourselves, must be a generational thing.
*ironically, a retired dentist. For the first few years we received crates for free toothpaste samples !
Just got in.from work and i have a letter! -A survey from the NHS. Nothing else though, which supports an above.post that NHS letters are treated differently.
Our post isn’t necessarily our address. We and other neighbours wander around the area posting each other’s letters on a regular basis.
my NHS ‘confirming appointments’ are automatic and to make sure the patient attends. Not attending costs thousands per year. I just have to key in date of birth and a yes or no answer as to whether I’ll be turning up.