Items being lost by ParcelForce at Coventry Hub

[NickRMCustomer]

Hello Postal Workers and fellow Customers,

I have had some difficult experiences with ParcelForce this year, and I’m wondering if anyone here can offer an opinion or advice?

This is specific to ParcelForce and the Processing Centre in Coventry, as everything sent to me from overseas that has been processed by Royal Mail has arrived, although the time taken has been longer at times, probably owing to increased checks and other obvious issues that all services have faced.

Coming back to ParcelForce; I have been sent 5 items that have been passed on to ParcelForce rather than Royal Mail so far this year, and only 2 have ever been delivered. The items appear to be scanned on arrival at the International Hub, sometimes even at the National Hub afterwards, and then disappear. I have attempted to pursue this with ParcelForce but haven’t been able to get anywhere.

PF took an initial line of it being a Customs issue, I made extensive enquiries with Border Force and HMRC and they confirmed it wouldn’t have been subject to a Customs Charge and had been passed through. PF then stated that they might have fallen off a conveyor belt, been damaged or sent to recovery. This would be understandable for a one-off item, but for 3 out of 5 to disappear in the same way is quite concerning.

Of the two parcels delivered, one had a new address stuck over the top of mine, but had been assigned the same tracking number as the parcel it accompanied it, so it was delivered to me.

My concern is that something is going very wrong at the Coventry Hub. Has anyone else had similar experiences?

As I say, everything that has been sent to me from outside of the UK and has been passed to Royal Mail has been processed through Langley, and on one item a Custom Charge was levied and there was a process to pay this. The disappearance of mail sent via PF now seems suspicious.

It appears PF is not subject to external oversight from what I can gather. What would the next steps be, when the formal complaints process simple brings the same set of reasons everytime (blame Customs, then don’t blame Customs, then say it was sent to Recovery, then say it was damaged) – three out of five parcels lost is a pretty awful statistic.

My heart sunk two weeks ago when I checked a tracking number and it showed it was being passed on to PF and guesss what, it's vanished again.

Does anyone have any advice?

Nick