Two-week wait for deliveries in Royal Mail ‘postal deserts’

ROYAL MAIL is delivering post to neighbourhoods as little as once a fortnight, leaving pockets of the country to become “postal deserts”.

Households have been left without letter deliveries as post bosses grapple with chronic staff shortages, rock-bottom industrial relations and the fallout from the biggest shake-up of working practices for a quarter of a century.

Hospital appointments are being missed, speeding or parking fines left unpaid and birthday celebrations affected as some areas have been left without mail for weeks on end.

Royal Mail is expected to unveil figures this week showing that annual delivery performance has sunk to nearrecord lows, with insiders branding the areas “postal deserts”. Some estimates suggest dozens of areas are affected, with households collecting bundles of post from sorting offices.

Residents in south-east London have complained on social media that they “seem to only get post every two weeks”. Others say that staff at sorting offices have told them that many of their

‘The patient is marked by the hospital as a ‘did not attend’ and may be sent back to their GP’

colleagues are off sick or on holiday. A “lack of postal vans” has been blamed for deliveries grinding to a halt in Dorking, Surrey, residents have claimed. Yet the situation is far from uniform with adjacent areas in the same postcode experiencing significantly different levels of service.

Nick Freeman, the motoring lawyer known as Mr Loophole, said that disruption to the postal deliveries could allow speeding motorists to escape a fine or points on their driving licence.

Laws state that anyone caught speeding must receive a notice of intended prosecution (NIP) within 14 days of the alleged offence. He advised drivers to “keep the envelope” if and when a speeding ticket arrives as a way to challenge the allegations in court.

Rachel Power, head of the Patients Association, said: “This has consequences as the patient is marked by the hospital as a ‘did not attend’ and may be discharged back to their GP. That means they go back on the waiting list.”

A spokesman for Royal Mail said: “We are committed to improving our performance and accelerating Royal Mail’s transformation in order to restore service levels.”