We have been aware that Royal Mail does not always operate the service that it advertises but the recent Panorama documentary Royal Mail: Where's My Post? makes for interesting viewing. It highlights cases where people are not receiving any mail for several weeks, leading to missed medical appointments. In many places customers have found the Royal Mail service to be so bad that they have resorted to picking their mail up from the sorting office to ensure they receive it.

As part of their investigation into delayed mail the Panorama team put trackers into several items of mail to find out where they went. It found that in some cases mail was sitting in the sorting office for as many as 10 days without being delivered. It also found evidence that Royal Mail are prioritising parcels over letter mail which is many case are only being delivered once of twice a week. At PC2Paper we find that letters do take much longer than the Royal Mail estimate, 1st class which Royal Mail estimate at 1 working day generally take anything between 1-4 days, sometimes longer and 2nd class mail which Royal Mail estimates at 3 working days usually takes about a week to arrive at the destination.

In addition to the above we are finding that Royal Mail are taking longer the scan mail in at the sorting office. Whilst this used to happen on the evening it was collected from us, this is not normally happening until the next day, sometimes 2 days after Royal Mail have collected items. We are also finding that we are currently only receiving mail deliveries once or twice a week causing delays to receiving mail at our mailboxes. Royal Mail are trying to switch to a three day service rather than the six day service they are currently meant to provide but if the findings of the Panorama documentary are correct it would seem that they are already providing a limited service in many areas.