INVESTIGATION
Undercover at Royal Mail: ‘Never mind the letters, just take the parcels’
Why is so much post delivered late? Our investigation shows how urgent reminders and NHS appointment letters are left on the shelf
Louise Eccles
Dominic Hauschild
Saturday December 16 2023, 11.59pm, The Sunday Times
At a Royal Mail sorting office in Southampton, a long-serving postman grumbles to a new colleague about how gruelling the job has become. There are dozens of parcels to carry on every postal route.
What happens, asks the fresh recruit. “Does that mean you have to leave the letters back here, and just take the parcels?”
“You’re not supposed to,” the postman explains. “It’s illegal.”
“So that doesn’t happen?”
“Oh that definitely does happen. More often than what it should do. But yeah, no, it is against the law, and they shouldn’t be doing it.”
What the postman does not know is that his colleague is an
undercover reporter for The Sunday Times.
An investigation has found that postal workers are being forced todeliver parcels ahead of letters — leaving first-class letters, bills, government correspondence, fines and hospital appointments abandoned in the depot. Royal Mail has a legal obligation to offer to deliver letters every day — Monday to Saturday — to every street.
Journalists working as postal workers in sorting offices in London and Southampton were told by managers and postal workers that parcels were routinely being prioritised over less profitable letters. Senior bosses at Royal Mail have been insisting there is no central policy of prioritising parcels over letters.
Last year’s financial results for Royal Mail show that it delivers 1.4 billion parcels in the UK and almost eight billion letters, but it received £4.8 billion in revenue from the parcels and £3.7 billion from letters. Losses are growing — to £319 million in the six months to September, after a dispute with staff over pay and working conditions.The price of a first-class stamp has
recently risen to £1.25 — the third increase in 18 months, which Royal Mail has blamed on cost pressures and the fact that it must deliver letters six days a week.
Undercover footage from sorting offices shows how at the end of each working day in the run-up to Christmas some streets still had piles of post waiting to be delivered, but no parcels.
Residents in these roads said hospital appointments had been missed because of the delay in getting letters; others refuse to buy first-class stamps because it takes so long for post to arrive. We were told the post had not been delivered for three days in some streets.
Complaints are mounting about the consequences of delayed post — with fines, birthdays, legal letters and financial payments being missed.
Asked why only the parcels had been delivered but not the letters, one postal worker in Wandsworth, south London, said: “You’d have to ask Royal Mail that. They prioritise parcels. They’re not supposed to but they do prioritise parcels.”
Another postman said: “If you know you might not complete [a round], what you need to do is bring it back [to the depot] or they will decide what to take out. Leave the letters, take the parcels today. They will let you know that.”
How the rules have changed
Royal Mail says it is not illegal or against the law to clear parcels before letters when necessary to do so, adding that there are times when it has to make a conscious effort to prioritise parcels during peak periods. It says this is not the position across the board. It noted that Ofcom, the regulator, “did not identify any suggestion that senior management had directed the prioritisation of parcels”.
It is under pressure from
rivals such as Evri and DPD and has made no secret of its plans to become a parcels-focused business. It is trying to modernise, but has also been cutting costs. Since September last year, Royal Mail has reduced its workforce by 9,000 people including 2,000 redundancies.
However, a condition of its privatisation in 2013 was that it must offer to deliver letters to every address in the country six days a week for the same price, and parcels five days a week. This universal service obligation is governed by the Postal Services Act 2011 and the universal postal service order set out in 2012 to ensure that vital letters from the NHS, government bodies, banks and utility companies are not left waiting.
Last year Royal Mail asked the government to release it from its obligation to deliver letters six days a week, scrapping Saturday deliveries. Ofcom is reviewing this requirement.
While Royal Mail awaits the outcome, its senior management has insisted that letters are not being sidelined. However, residents say Saturday deliveries have in effect been axed in their area and that they receive their post sporadically.
Managers at delivery offices cite staff shortages, high sickness rates, a lack of space for piles of parcels and a reluctance among new staff and some existing workers to make their rounds on foot to deliver letters, rather than deliver parcels using vans. Postal workers say traditional walking postal routes have got longer because they deliver so many small parcels. They take longer to deliver because many have to be handed over in person, rather than put through a post box as letters are.
Royal Mail admitted in its latest financial results that it had become overreliant on casual agency staff and pledged to recruit more permanent workers again. Last month it was fined £5.6 million by Ofcom for failing to meet its first and second-class delivery targets in the 2022-23 financial year. Just 89 per cent of delivery routes are completed daily, when it should be 99.9 per cent. These performance targets do not apply during December, however.
Hired within hours
To find out what happens inside a sorting office, two reporters applied for the job of “postperson with driving” advertised on the Royal Mail website. One applied at 9.53am, and by 2.31pm that same day was made a conditional job offer over the phone. The other was offered a conditional job offer less than five minutes into a phone interview.
Full-time postal workers normally wear a uniform including T-shirts, jumpers, trousers and shoes but both reporters were told that they should turn up to work in their own clothes to begin with. This is because the turnover of new staff is so high. If new recruits were still there after about ten days then they would be allowed to order postal workers’ uniforms.
Almost from the first moment that new employees start, Royal Mail makes its business priorities clear. At its induction training course a video said: “We’re transforming into a parcels-focused company because we want to be the carrier of choice for the UK.”
Trainers on the course talked about the importance of large retail customers including Boohoo, Apple and Amazon. One trainer said: “These are quite well-known household names and, our strategic account team, they currently have over 200 customers who spend a significant amount of money in Royal Mail every year so it’s important that we ensure we provide them really, really good service. Not just to these customers, but to all our customers, but as I say these are some of our key, branded loyal customers.”
Just 24 hours after their employment started, one reporter was sent out on a postal round with a more experienced postman delivering small parcels and letters, including bills, government documents and greetings cards to hundreds of addresses. Another was given a fluorescent orange hi-vis Royal Mail vest and a red satchel after 48 hours and sent out to help deliver mail. All the post is put in a red trolley and the red satchels are filled up with the post a few streets at a time.
The day began in south London at 7.30am in the noisy sorting office, emptying huge postbags and filling up the large shelves, known as frames, for a particular group of streets in order of house number. Parcels had to be piled high, at the top of the racks, and would sometimes tumble to the floor due to the tiny space available.
Permanent postal workers had their own round and took pride in getting the work done quickly. After filling the frames, the postmen would then empty the shelves of letters and parcels, loading up their red trolleys and bags. Each had their own system for ensuring that the parcels and letters were easy to grab, in strict order, on their rounds. The postmen who go out on foot take smaller parcels and letters, the larger ones are given to different postal workers in vans.
Reporters were told that if they had too much to deliver, they should ask a manager who would let them know whether to bring it back or “leave the letters, take the parcels ”. If there was no assigned postman for a route, or the postal worker was off sick, those letters would not be delivered; parcels, we were told, usually would be because they built up quickly in the sorting office.
The job of postman involves walking 8 to 12 miles a day in all weather — in excess of 20,000 steps a day. A full-time salary is between £25,000 and £30,000 depending on the location.
The most experienced postal workers knew which houses had dogs that jumped up at the letterboxes, or slippery stairs; which homeworkers were most likely to take a parcel in for their neighbours, and which elderly customers were slow to come to the door and needed more time. Everyone is pleased to see them, and the regularly people stop to say hello — some residents panicked at the sight of two new employees, asking if their favourite postman was retiring.
The toll on workers
It was at the end of the day in the sorting office where the pressures became clear. Postmen are expected to finish their rounds by 3pm, at which time the racks should be cleared of all letters and parcels.
In both sorting offices at the end of the day there were some racks full of letters. Conversations in staff rooms revolved around the workload and whether people had been able to complete their round.
In Southampton, one postal worker who had been employed by Royal Mail for more than two decades described how the pressures of the job had grown in the past three to four years as they now had “tons of parcels”. He said “You’re still having to walk the same distance … So to add the parcels then adds time to the staff.”
One new recruit quit after a short stint working in Wandsworth. He left his new uniform, which he had received one week earlier, in a bag in the manager’s office. Asked why, a manager said many recruits wanted the life of parcel couriers, working from vans, rather than door-to-door letter deliveries.
When a manager in Wandsworth was asked about the full racks of mail that could be seen at the end of a shift, she blamed some workers who she said had been had been employed as postmen walking postal routes but had “given the impression” they were only there to deliver parcels in vans.
One round of streets apparently had no permanent postal worker assigned to it. A postwoman stacking letters into the already-full racks, said: “There’s no one on it, that’s why it’s so full … It was getting split up and everyone was taking a piece of it. But because it’s Christmas now, it’s too busy, so we are not taking it any more. That’s why there’s no one on it to actually do it.”
The toll on you: ‘Mum missed three hospital appointments’
Local residents say the postal delays are having an impact on their lives. In Wandsworth, one woman on a street where letters had been left on the frames in the sorting office said: “Our post is very sporadic. I haven’t had any Christmas cards yet and I probably won’t send any because stamps are so expensive and they’ll probably arrive late anyway. My mother missed a hospital appointment the other day because the letter arrived the day after the appointment. That’s happened three times.”
Clifford Bird, 78, a retired postman who lives in the Regents Park area of Southampton, said he refused to buy first-class stamps because the post was so slow. He said: “We do get everything eventually but they might take three or four days. We just wait and hope they arrive. NHS appointments, birthday cards, all sorts arrive late. We don’t get mail on Saturdays any more.”
Postal delays are affecting other areas too.
In Colchester, Essex, one customer approached her postman when she did not receive any cards on her 94th birthday. The postman said: “It is heartbreaking. I went back to the depot that evening and went through 23 boxes of post to find her cards and made a special trip to deliver them to her the next day. It’s just not fair. It’s not right.”
Residents in Liverpool and Plymouth have complained of missing hospital appointments. Courts are facing a glut of motorists trying to escape parking and speeding fines because their letters never arrived.
Jess Keep, 30, who works in IT and lives in Yeovil, Somerset, says she has not received letter deliveries for more than two weeks, adding: “My partner had a hospital appointment [on Saturday] and he would have missed it if he hadn’t called the hospital to speak to them about something else.” She visited the Yeovil delivery office on Thursday and, after queuing for one hour, collected one hospital letter as well as three other letters.
“It’s stressful because, if you know you’re expecting a bill or hospital appointment, you don’t know if you will get it in time or miss it. I do feel for people who can’t pick their post up,” she said.
Hannah, 37, a school teacher from north Watford, says her family have only had only four letter deliveries in the past five weeks — on November 10 and 22 and December 5 and 15.
Most of the cards for her son’s birthday arrived on November 22, nine days too late. Her mother-in-law posted special Christmas cards to both of Hannah’s children, aged four and six, but only one has arrived.
She said: “My son is waiting for two referrals from the NHS and the appointment letters were supposed to come in December. My worry is we miss an appointment and we will be back to square one.”
Piles of post become a hazard
Royal Mail said services in Watford had been hit by vacancies and staff absences but the maximum delay would now be two days. It said deliveries in Yeovil had been affected by lifts being out of order and flooding but most routes were being “delivered to standard”.
Royal Mail’s sometimes cramped and ageing delivery offices are also struggling to handle the huge volume of parcel. Royal Mail says average parcel sizes have grown by around 30 per cent in recent years, and in any typical week parcels take up about 90 per cent of the sorting space in its delivery offices. Changing consumer habits mean parcel sizes have also doubled in the past six years.
In Southampton, the depot manager had started four weeks before and was trying to increase recruitment of permanent staff to alleviate the problem of leftover letters. He said: “If you let parcels build up around the frame it becomes a safety hazard when you have to step over.”
On the wall of the sorting office in Southampton, a large poster instructed staff that they must clear their frames of parcels and letters by the end of their shift. However, within a few feet of the frames there were shelves crammed with letters on several days in early December. Asked about the leftover letters, one manager blamed “a lot of sick and a lot of vacancies”.
Ofcom says it meets Royal Mail regularly to make sure it is taking steps to improve service levels “as a matter of urgency”.
In response to the investigation’s findings, Sir Vince Cable, who was the business secretary when Royal Mail was privatised in 2013, said: ‘It sounds like scandalously bad management and failure to observe the legal requirement to provide a universal service.Surely the regulator should intervene and be asked to explain why they have not done so.”
Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow secretary of state for business and trade, said: “This important investigation raises some very serious questions about the delivery of the universal service obligation.”
Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which says it represents the majority of postal workers, said: “It is clear from what postal workers are saying and what customers are seeing that on the ground parcels are being prioritised over letters across the UK.
“Morale amongst postal workers is at an all-time low. They are devastated to not be properly servicing their customers.”
Royal Mail has insisted that there is no company policy of prioritising parcels over letters.
It said: “We will always do our utmost to ensure both letters and parcels are delivered on time. The run-up to Christmas is our busiest time of year, with more than double the normal number of letters and parcels passing through our network.
“We have always been clear that at busy times such as Christmas it may be logistically necessary to clear parcels first to avoid network issues, keep the mail moving and ensure the safety of our colleagues, especially in small delivery offices. These measures have been shared with Ofcom who have not identified any suggestion that Royal Mail senior management have directed the prioritisation of parcels over letters outside of recognised contingency plans.
“We have taken steps to improve quality of service and deliver Christmas, including recruiting 16,000 seasonal workers, opening five temporary sorting centres and launching a quality of service incentive scheme for all operational staff. The vast majority of mail is delivered on time and our latest published quality-of-service figures show that three quarters of first-class letters arrive the following day, and 96 per cent are delivered within three days of posting.”
