Special Delivery letter never delivered

[NorthernGuy]

Last week I posted a letter with cheque to HMRC, at their request. I've never liked the security aspects of a cheque in the post, so I sent this letter via Special Delivery at a Post Office.

It should have been delivered the next day as per the guarantee, but the tracking trail went cold with the item last seen at 2am at the North West Midlands mail centre, with delivery scheduled later that day.

On principle, I applied for and have been promised a refund for the apparent non-delivery, but that isn't the point. I wanted peace of mind that a cheque drawn on a high balance account would not fall into a stranger's hands, but it appears this very scenario may have happened. I didn't add the optional consequential loss insurance as there was no way to estimate what level of cover would be needed for a lost cheque and what a bad person might be able to do with it.

Do you knowledgeable people think the letter may have been delivered but just not scanned, or that it's lost? If the latter, is there any prospect it could be found and may yet be delivered?

HMRC are difficult to deal with at the best of times, long phone queues, office hours only, and the person on the line may not know if a recent letter & cheque are in their system, hence enquiring here first. I don't want to cancel a cheque that they might have banked.

So, what do you think? Should I be cancelling the cheque? Special Delivery remains, it appears, the most secure postal system available, so this episode has really shaken my confidence in how I get important mail safely from A to B.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Do you knowledgeable people think the letter may have been delivered but just not scanned, or that it's lost? If the latter, is there any prospect it could be found and may yet be delivered?

Yes, mainly because of their size being a government department, how much they receive, and that their processes are necessarily different, because of that,t it is a common complaint on here that HRMC, Passport office, DWP, etc don't appear as delivered on tracking when they actually have been.

If it goes on for a few weeks, then I would start to worry, but if it's been a few days, then most likely, they have received it, just that the systems have not been updated yet.

[NorthernGuy]

Do you knowledgeable people think the letter may have been delivered but just not scanned, or that it's lost? If the latter, is there any prospect it could be found and may yet be delivered?

Yes, mainly because of their size being a government department, how much they receive, and that their processes are necessarily different, because of that,t it is a common complaint on here that HRMC, Passport office, DWP, etc don't appear as delivered on tracking when they actually have been.

If it goes on for a few weeks, then I would start to worry, but if it's been a few days, then most likely, they have received it, just that the systems have not been updated yet.

Thanks for the reply, you have given me some hope. But I am confused about one thing. I work in a company that receives a high volume of Special Delivery packages, with high value contents. Often when I arrive in the morning, postie is onsite with Security, scanning loads of items whist witnessed by a guard. However slow my company might be to process those items, the sender should have tracking proof of delivery very soon afterwards.

Are you saying that this scanning upon delivery doesn't happen for large government offices? Or if later, how does that work? With no POD available the next day, every single RM customer could claim for a refund, not to RM's advantage.

[Snaggletooth]

Are you saying that this scanning upon delivery doesn't happen for large government offices?

Yes. It isn’t just Government facilities, but they tend to be the largest ones.

[NorthernGuy]

Are you saying that this scanning upon delivery doesn't happen for large government offices?

Yes. It isn’t just Government facilities, but they tend to be the largest ones.

So you are saying that at these large Government offices, the Special Delivery items are just handed over along with the rest of the ordinary post, and never scanned as delivered?

[yellowbelly]

So you are saying that at these large Government offices, the Special Delivery items are just handed over along with the rest of the ordinary post, and never scanned as delivered?

No insider knowledge but I'm pretty confident Special Delivery items would be separated from 'ordinary post'.

With there probably being hundreds of these SD's each day there'll be some sort of mechanism for proving receipt but what it is - ?
Perhaps a certain number of SD's are scanned into a mailbag, that mailbag is scanned as received, but each individual letter doesn't receive
a scan immediately on delivery. Perhaps eventually the mailbag acceptance scan matches up with the SD numbers in it to prove receipt. Just guessing.

IIRC when I sent stuff to the LPA registering service, the SD delivery proof didn't show up for a few days, definitely wasn't the next day.

[NorthernGuy]

So you are saying that at these large Government offices, the Special Delivery items are just handed over along with the rest of the ordinary post, and never scanned as delivered?

No insider knowledge but I'm pretty confident Special Delivery items would be separated from 'ordinary post'.

With there probably being hundreds of these SD's each day there'll be some sort of mechanism for proving receipt but what it is - ?
Perhaps a certain number of SD's are scanned into a mailbag, that mailbag is scanned as received, but each individual letter doesn't receive
a scan immediately on delivery. Perhaps eventually the mailbag acceptance scan matches up with the SD numbers in it to prove receipt. Just guessing.

IIRC when I sent stuff to the LPA registering service, the SD delivery proof didn't show up for a few days, definitely wasn't the next day.

My assumption would have been that the only opportunity to scan a letter as delivered was with the item in the postie's hand at the destination, and that once he'd departed without it this was impossible? The idea you can scan something afterwards is more than strange to me.

Perhaps I'm getting old, but when you pay a premium for Special Delivery of a letter, what you are buying is peace of mind, knowing it's got there. I could have sent it with a first class stamp and trusted to luck. My premium has instead actually bought me worry, the letter seemingly vanished en route and a RM refund as if to confirm that. In the past I've sent things like Wills (of a deceased) to the probate registry, where loss would be catastrophic. I just can't fathom this situation being normal.