General Secretary Dave Ward on the universal service obligation.

[jahbalon]

Post

The USO as it stands is dead in the water. There has to be imminent change otherwise the company will die.

Letters are dead, they are not coming back, and I agree with Royal Mail that parcels are the current future.

I smell a backstabbing manager

You smell wrong then. I am just a realist. I don't live in Walter Mitty Land like some do on here

Letters are gone, they ain't making a comeback anytime soon.
We have to get with the times

[PostalWorker13]

Post

The USO as it stands is dead in the water. There has to be imminent change otherwise the company will die.

Letters are dead, they are not coming back, and I agree with Royal Mail that parcels are the current future.

I smell a backstabbing manager

You smell wrong then. I am just a realist. I don't live in Walter Mitty Land like some do on here

Letters are gone, they ain't making a comeback anytime soon.
We have to get with the times

Yes, letters are gone which is why the company has just released its worst set of quality of service results of all time. Letters are gone, yet thousands of posties up and down the country are failing to clear their frame every day.

You clearly don’t work in delivery. You may not like letters and want the business to be parcel orientated, but they certainly aren’t dead and the company has a legal obligation to deliver mail. Not that they care about that any more.

[enskied]

RM lie surely not

Dave's wearing an orange t-shirt. He has nothing to do now. Can't even bother to dress himself before talking...

[clashcityrocker]

Dave's wearing an orange t-shirt.

The future is bright. The future is orange.
Maybe he is trying to entice new members. Maybe he has a new job?

[ANDREW CROCOMBE]

Dave Ward the new RM CEO is the rumour. Unless the rounds are made smaller and we recruit thousands, a 3,4,5 day uso doesn't matter. A 5 day week with no one needing to work days off - parcel crew on weekends - but we still won't clear on a daily basis. Crap. Make rounds bigger is my scary forecast, knowing the idiots who make decisions.

[rubberbond]

According to a letter published in the Daily Telegraph last week , whereby the author wanted to write to Royal Mail to complain about something , was told Royal Mail don’t accept letters! If they don’t believe in their core product we are in deeper trouble than I thought.

[jahbalon]

Post

The USO as it stands is dead in the water. There has to be imminent change otherwise the company will die.

Letters are dead, they are not coming back, and I agree with Royal Mail that parcels are the current future.

I smell a backstabbing manager

You smell wrong then. I am just a realist. I don't live in Walter Mitty Land like some do on here

Letters are gone, they ain't making a comeback anytime soon.
We have to get with the times

Yes, letters are gone which is why the company has just released its worst set of quality of service results of all time. Letters are gone, yet thousands of posties up and down the country are failing to clear their frame every day.

You clearly don’t work in delivery. You may not like letters and want the business to be parcel orientated, but they certainly aren’t dead and the company has a legal obligation to deliver mail. Not that they care about that any more.

I don't work in delivery anymore, but I have done it all before, and in those days there was too many letters to deal with

But surely you must see the writing on the wall, and that is not a pun
Letters are on the way out, it's all e mails and texts these days, for convenience sake,
I don't see that changing anytime soon. I hope I am wrong, because I would like to see letter writing becoming more vogue again.

Who knows ? Expect the Unexpected.

[Seymour Buts]

According to a letter published in the Daily Telegraph last week , whereby the author wanted to write to Royal Mail to complain about something , was told Royal Mail don’t accept letters! If they don’t believe in their core product we are in deeper trouble than I thought.

I think they showed that when going paperless with our wage slips.

[Seymour Buts]

I've said for a long time, with mail volumes now a 6 day USO is impossible to justify. I regularly miss entire streets now Monday and Tuesdays; call rate must be in the region of 20%. Quite obviously that's ridiculous. The letters are barely worth taking out on particularly quiet days. The union need to negotiate this so it works to our benefit. Keep Sundays as voluntary; give staff that want it a mon-friday working week, with Saturday's on a rota basis supplemented by those of us on 6 day SA contracts.

[postslippete]

So Dave Ward says some of his friends/colleagues come back from annual leave and there's a week's worth of mail that hasn't gone out.

And that's acceptable??

Never mind moving with the times, Royal Mail still collect loads of revenue from letters given that they have made duties bigger and bumped up the price of postage. A 5 day USO isn't going to solve the quality of service issues if the company are just going to throw away all the profits to shareholders.

Unfortunately, it's a catch 22 because Ofcom aren't holding Royal Mail to account over this. I don't even think that they will step in when the company is profitable and making record profits either.

You know what I think we need given that the price of first class letters keep going up?? A tracked barcode on every single letter......we might get trigger finger but it's really not as daft as it sounds. How else can we measure the real quality of service?

Before anyone jumps in, letter volumes are falling, duties will get bigger to compensate, new delivery methods are needed. All the freebies and scam mail that use to come in our network are gone but bank statements, NHS letters, birthday cards etc etc are still being delivered and people rely on an efficient postal network to deliver them. Who knows, it might even entice some of the competition if they charge enough per item.

[theotherone]

So Dave Ward says some of his friends/colleagues come back from annual leave and there's a week's worth of mail that hasn't gone out.

And that's acceptable??

Never mind moving with the times, Royal Mail still collect loads of revenue from letters given that they have made duties bigger and bumped up the price of postage. A 5 day USO isn't going to solve the quality of service issues if the company are just going to throw away all the profits to shareholders.

Unfortunately, it's a catch 22 because Ofcom aren't holding Royal Mail to account over this. I don't even think that they will step in when the company is profitable and making record profits either.

You know what I think we need given that the price of first class letters keep going up?? A tracked barcode on every single letter......we might get trigger finger but it's really not as daft as it sounds. How else can we measure the real quality of service?

Before anyone jumps in, letter volumes are falling, duties will get bigger to compensate, new delivery methods are needed. All the freebies and scam mail that use to come in our network are gone but bank statements, NHS letters, birthday cards etc etc are still being delivered and people rely on an efficient postal network to deliver them. Who knows, it might even entice some of the competition if they charge enough per item.

Royal Mail wanted a barcode on every letter and it got knocked back by Ofcom they also tried to get out of specials by 1pm and that got knocked back too.

[enskied]

Yet offices are crammed with undelivered mail.
Mail volume may (arguably) be falling . So are staffing volumes.
There's no one to deliver it.

[Woody Guthrie]

Yet offices are crammed with undelivered mail.

No they aren't.
Some probably are and this forum being what it is loads of people will jump in to say their office is but if you think about it logically if all DOs were like this 1st class QofS would be 5% not the (still s**t but nowhere near as bad) 75+% it is.

The truth is the majority of offices are clearing but some areas are deep in the s**t, unfortunately the nature of an Internet forum like this means that you're far more likely to hear from the problem offices than anyone else.

[guardianangel]

The problem with the decline in letters is that it doesn’t mean a decline in workload. We’ve all seen fewer letters come in, but the drop in call-rate has simply led to bigger walks. We’re probably now delivering to more houses but with fewer letters, while additionally the growth in packets has added to that. Going down to 5 days will just make the job harder, as your call-rate will increase on your walk that was added and added to as letters declined. Delivering 400 letters across 800 houses isn’t easier than delivering 400 letters across 400 houses.

Perhaps RM will put duties back in if we go 5 days then the cover posties that won't be needed can have a duty and everyone will have a much easier time of it

We haven't got any cover duties,they just leave ours in the frame,Mondays will become the heaviest day of the week so all the times will have to change again.

[enskied]

Yet offices are crammed with undelivered mail.

No they aren't.
Some probably are and this forum being what it is loads of people will jump in to say their office is but if you think about it logically if all DOs were like this 1st class QofS would be 5% not the (still s**t but nowhere near as bad) 75+% it is.

The truth is the majority of offices are clearing but some areas are deep in the s**t, unfortunately the nature of an Internet forum like this means that you're far more likely to hear from the problem offices than anyone else.

Beg to differ Woodie. We haven't be able to clear for years now. Before the the pandemic.
No sign of area reps... they give us a wide birth.

It's not one office it's our region.

We have a network that communicates faster than our bosses or representatives.