Royal Mail insist postal vote delays aren't their fault after criticism

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/royal-mail-in ... 21681.html

Royal Mail has rejected suggestions they are blame for postal vote delays and insists there is ‘no backlog’ ahead of the General Election.

Postal Affairs minister Kevin Hollinrake is said to be ‘urgently’ investigating the issue with people struggling to get ballot packs in time for Thursday’s vote.

He made a suggestion Royal Mail should have anticipated the extra demands for postal because of the summer holidays, with Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney suggesting voters could be ‘disenfranchised’ because of the delays.

It’s been a particular issue in Scotland with the school holidays starting last week and many families are already abroad.

READ MORE: General Election: What to do if your postal ballot has not arrived

The Royal Mail say they aren’t to blame though, with a spokesperson for the service said: “We have no backlog of postal votes and, whilst we are not complacent, we remain confident that postal votes handed to us on time will be delivered prior to polling day.

“Where specific concerns have been raised, we have investigated and confirmed ballot packs are being delivered as soon as they arrive in our network.

“We would welcome a review into the timetable for future elections with all stakeholders to ensure that the system for printing and administering postal votes before they are handed to Royal Mail works as smoothly as possible.”

Appearing on Tuesday’s morning broadcast round, health minister Maria Caulfield had said that Mr Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, was “in direct contact” with Royal Mail over the problem.

“Kevin is investigating this urgently,” she said. “I know there’s extra resources going into this to try and do a sweep of all the sorting offices and make sure they’re out there.”

It comes after Mr Hollinrake told the Telegraph that he did not think there was any issue at play “other than Royal Mail being competent and fulfilling their obligations under the USO (Universal Service Obligation)”.

“There’s a resourcing issue. They have recruited extra people and I welcome that but they’ve got to make sure they’ve got the right number of people to deliver the mail at busy times like this,” he told the paper.

“It’s not acceptable it’s sat in sorting offices. It needs to be delivered to people’s houses. So they need to put more people on to do that.”

[BenacreNick]

I wonder what Mr Hollinkrake MP will find when he finishes his urgent investigation

[oypostie]

I wonder what Mr Hollinkrake MP will find when he finishes his urgent investigation

He'll discover we're not prioritising parcels

[Moose67]

Perhaps they could blame it on Covid or Strikes but we know it should blamed on Simon's idea of running the staff and company into the ground and concentrating on parcels and then leave with a nice severance package and a brief full of shares

[SpacePhoenix]

MCs ship them out to the DOs the day they arrive. If they arrive too late to go on the wave 1 sequencing then they got sent out as manual.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

MCs ship them out to the DOs the day they arrive. If they arrive too late to go on the wave 1 sequencing then they got sent out as manual.

Unsorted items take 2 to 3 times longer to sort. This implies that postal workers spend more time outdoors (resulting in higher costs) or some mail remains undelivered (leading to delays).

Therefore, unless Royal Mail addresses such issues, such as when Mail Centres send out unsorted items due to cost efficiency or for better statistics, or simply to expedite the mail to Delivery Offices, the overall cost for Royal Mail will consistently stay elevated.

However, if the entire process is streamlined as a unified system rather than separate components, Royal Mail will cease squandering money needlessly.