Response from Royal Mail about parcel delivery complaints

 I passed on various comments from local residents to the Delivery Centre manager at Ledgers lane, here is his response in full

I hope you are well sorry that it has taken so long to reply but things
have been extremely hectic here due to an increase in short term SL that we
were experiencing. This has led to managers being out on delivery until
quite late in the evening again to try and ensure that we met with delivery
specification. However I have got some good news in that our recent
recruitment campaigns have paid off and we now have 7 new members of staff
in post who should be fully trained up within the next 2 -3 weeks, this
will obviously reduce the amount of late deliveries that some of our
customers have been experiencing.

With regards to your enquiries please see below:

Packets for delivery to the majority of Headington deliveries should be
back in the office within 24 hours of the card being left. We have had some
issues where items have taken longer than this due to the deliveries being
completed on OT in the afternoon and as such the collections that bring the
mail back to the unit from the post office have already happened before the
items have been brought back to the pouching off point. However this should
be resolved in part by the new entrants and the reduction in need of
utilising OT for delivery coverage. We also still have a couple of people
who have been putting 48 hours on the card for safety sake, by this i mean
that they don’t want their customers to come to the office and the item not
being here.

Another of the issues raised was that some residents were told that they
could collect their parcels within 5 hours of the card left. The time left
for collection will depend on the method of delivery and where the delivery
is. For example most of the East Oxford deliveries come back to the office
once they have completed and subsequently bring the items straight back.
Further more if the items were large packets and delivered by a van then
these to come back to the unit and thus a shorter collection time will be
offered.With regards to the Headington deliveries these do tend to finish
at their last delivery point and this leads to the packets being returned
to the post office and sent back to us via the normal collection route
which is why the delay occurs.

I would be extremely surprised if the staff chose to just leave a card for
an item without trying. The simple reason for this is that it takes longer
to write out a card than it does to deliver the items in the majority of
occasions. It is possible that the wrong time has been placed on the card
or that the customer was in a part of the house where they could not hear
the door. I would state however that the guys cannot spend very long
waiting at each door as it would be impossible for them to finish. During
the Christmas period our parcel traffic increased dramatically and this led
to an increase in work load for the staff and would also reduce the amount
of time that they could spend at each door. That said i still feel that the
majority of staff would have left a reasonable amount of time for the
customer to answer.

Parking is an ongoing issue with the site and i am also aware or the issues
that you other customer had in which they were fined for parking on the
road outside of the unit. With regards to parking on the road outside i
believe that this allowed as it is a public highway and the only yellow
lines are to the side of the building. I have heard that the company that
are responsible for parking control of the actual units are known to be a
bit to enthusiastic on occasion. As i have already stated it is my
understanding that people are allowed to park on the road.

With regards to the parking bays they are often full first thing in the
morning. A large percentage of our staff utilise their cars on delivery and
they park there vehicles in this area so they can load them with mail. I
will have a look to see if we can free up set of bays for customer parking
only which should relieve this problem. I will also raise this with the CWU
representative this morning in our strategic liaison meeting.

With regards to the black Multipla this is one of my managers cars – he has
to park on site as we often need to go out and visit staff etc at short
notice. Further more due to a H&S order we have limited space to park at
the rear of the building.

I think that if we can free up the first set of bays for our customers that
this should reduce this problem significantly. I would also like to add
however that we have had occasions where people have been parking in our
bays that are nothing to do with us and this also unfortunately reduces the
amount of space for our customers.

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