Special Delivery signed by person in street.

[It's War]

I sent a parcel by Special Delivery before 9am. The addressee did not receive it. The matter was reported to the police and a statement taken from the postman. The postman agrees he gave the parcel to a man loitering outside of the address who claimed he was on his way to work. The man then drove away. My loss is £2000. Royal Mail suggest I am only able to claim £50 compensation. Due to the negligence of the postman I feel I should be able to claim the cost of my losses. Any advice would be great.

[crazyshrew]

The standard insurance for a 9am Special delivery item is £50 with the option to purchase insurance up to £2500.
and consequential loss cover of upt to £10,000!
However, when posting it is your responsibility to ensure you are using were using the appropriate service. As you used a service that only covers your item for £50, that's all you'll get out of RM

Of course if you could prove the item in question was of a significantly higher value you could stand a chance, but the best way to do that would be to have paid a little more and purchased the appropriate, higher value, insurance and show the receipt.

http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/ ... il2013.pdf

[It's War]

Yes, I am aware of the £50 limit. Although at the time of posting, I had no idea. It seems rather unfair that you pay approx 3x the cost of sending and a reduced compensation. The point is though, had Royal Mail provided the service which I paid for in a professional manner and the item was 'lost in the post', that would be one thing. But to have proven Royal Mail acted negligently and (rather than accidentally lost in the system) the parcel lost through incompetance , I believe puts a whole new position on the matter of a claim. Loss through the percentages of a flawed system is different to one specific staff member stating in a witness statement to the police that he actively failed to correctly deliver the parcel. This is therefore not a 'loss' in the usual meaning of the word. I believe a County Court judge would listen with interest to a properly brought case.

Anyway, whilst I am aware of the position RM would seek to take, the purpose of this thread is to be advised of an alternative view than the standard RM position.

[Snaggletooth]

If I was pottering about in my front garden and the postman arrived with an item bearing my address, it would be reasonable for the postman to get me to sign for it rather than passing by me and ringing the door bell, and refusing to let me sign for it.

Rightly or wrongly, an opposition barrister would probably make this kind of argument if your case got to court, and further point out that the mysterious signer had committed a criminal offence. The postman in your case can only have been negligent if Royal Mail have some procedure to follow to check on the identity of the person signing in this circumstance. I don't think they do.

I would take your case up with Royal Mail customer services, making a case for compensation and perhaps gently mention taking this to the press. If you aren't satisfied, escalate it to the regulator.

[It's War]

That is an interesting point. Thank you. A postie might often give deliveries to a person in the garden and this may be accepted practice if the postman recognises the addressee. But this happened on the street outside a small block of flats, in London. Not in the garden or stair well. Now, I imagine the reason for a reduced compensation limit for before 9 am deliveries is precisely due to additional risk associated with a fraudster knowing (pretty accurately) the time the postie will arrive and will have a good excuse for being 'on the way to work' just as the postie arrives. Therefore if the reduced compensation is due to additional risk, the postie should be aware of (trained for ?) such occurrences and therefore there might be published training or best practice guide which the postie should follow. Are there such training practices ?

This must happen all the time. It will not be the first time RM has to defend a small claims court action. I expect this case will be quietly resolved out of court, but has anyone any other pointers relating to RM possible response?

[swindonandy]

This must happen all the time. It will not be the first time RM has to defend a small claims court action. I expect this case will be quietly resolved out of court, but has anyone any other pointers relating to RM possible response?

Yes, there's a chance it'll cost someone their job. You clearly intend to make an issue therefore get your lawyer to find their own facts out.

[Snaggletooth]

A postie might often give deliveries to a person in the garden and this may be accepted practice if the postman recognises the addressee. But this happened on the street outside a small block of flats, in London. Not in the garden or stair well.

Maybe, maybe not, but if you want to prove negligence you are going to have to find something in law stating how this should have been handled differently, or some Royal Mail procedure covering the same, or find a very strong argument to work against the one I set out earlier.

Now, I imagine the reason for a reduced compensation limit for before 9 am deliveries is precisely due to additional risk associated with a fraudster knowing (pretty accurately) the time the postie will arrive and will have a good excuse for being 'on the way to work' just as the postie arrives. Therefore if the reduced compensation is due to additional risk, the postie should be aware of (trained for ?) such occurrences and therefore there might be published training or best practice guide which the postie should follow. Are there such training practices ?

The delivery window for Special Delivery by 9am is from 06:30 to 09:00 for private addresses, so it's not that small a time window. And SD9 is a very rare service, probably making up less than 1% of total SD sales in Post Offices. So, if you are implying that this man is hanging around for 150 minutes for a rare event, you probably aren't going to get anywhere.

And the compensation setting doesn't work like that. The regulator includes compensation levels in the 'basket' of benefits and costs when Royal Mail wants to raise prices. So some years ago, when RM were putting up general postal prices, RM had to increase the compensation level on SD by 1pm. In other words, the level of compensation on SD by 1pm is partly a political football, and therefore not entirely a commercial / risk based decision. I'm not sure that the above applies to SD9 but it does apply to SD1, so it's not really possible to make this comparison.

This must happen all the time. It will not be the first time RM has to defend a small claims court action. I expect this case will be quietly resolved out of court, but has anyone any other pointers relating to RM possible response?

I don't think that RM does end up in court that much, or not that I have heard of. My understanding is that because RM are a common carrier most consumer contract law does not apply, making them hard to sue (the other major common carrier are the railways, and I don't think anybody ever successfully takes them to court for the consequential loss caused by late trains).

However

I'm not sure about this, but I think SD9 might be a provided on a commercial basis, unlike SD1 / 1st / Airmail etc. Therefore, it might be possible to take them to county court for breech of contract, but you need to be really sure of what you are talking about.

I would search for the licence that the regulator issues to Royal Mail, this covers service standards, particularly as they relate to the integrity of the mail system. It's not that easy to find. Last time I did find it, it was a PDF document running to approx 100 pages.

[Snaggletooth]

I started looking up Royal Mail's licence (for reference, I got this far: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/post/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) but then I realised I was getting carried away.

What exactly do you want to achieve from going to county court? To me, it seems to break down like this:

1. Refund of postage, compensation for value of goods up to 50 £ - you can get this anyway by going through RM's refund procedure, i.e. submitting a P58inland;

2. Compensation beyond 50 £ and / or consequential loss claim - beyond the issues I mentioned before, you declined to take out extra cover, and this will count against you in court;

3. Prosecution of individuals involved - that would be a criminal matter, and nothing to do with the county court;

4. Royal Mail disciplining the postie - you can't influence this too much, and if the whole thing has been rumbling on for a while it might have run it's course anyway (negligence is hard to prove in employment law cases).

Regarding point 2, pursuing this puts you in some awkward legal positions. Firstly, if you say that you intentionally misled the Post Office clerk about the contents then you are opening yourself up to a criminal prosecution for not declaring the contents of a packet to a postal officer. Secondly, you could get accused of changing your story about the contents of the packet after the packet was lost in order to claim more money back from RM, which would be mail fraud, and again is a criminal offence. Obviously it would have to be one or the other of those, not both, but my point is that in pursuing a civil claim against RM you do run some risk of being under criminal prosecution in return.

[It's War]

Thanks for those pointers. I did mention previously that I had no idea the sending limit was only £50. However, my business insurance provides for losses through the post (as in this case) as long as Special Delivery is used for the minimum level of cover. Therefore I need not pay for increased compensation if I were to claim through my insurance. However, there remains quite a large uninsured loss in respect of no claims bonuses etc.

My real interest here is that a RM employee failed to comply with their training policy or had not been trained at all. Because of her negligence, lack of care, lack of training, breach of policy etc etc I have suffered a loss and RM will seek to suggest its my tough luck......heres £50.

Randomly losing something in the system is acceptable, but suffering a loss because of a specific incident of an employees actions is a different argument.

This happened to me three times last year. It's just that I actually have two Police statements from two of these occurrences.Where the posties have both claimed to have given the parcel to persons purporting to be the addressee on the street. The third one insists the parcel was correctly delivered and signed for within the address premises. That statement doesn't help my case. Except that the cctv fails to show the postie at all that day.

So its a matter of principle of being foisted off with £50 which enables RM to absolve themselves of responsibility, even though they are the whole reason why the loss occurred. And stating they have a signature as evidence the item was correctly delivered. This is now shown not to be the case. Indeed, one of the signatures spells out a very rude word.

Is there a training document which spells out how the postie should have attended to this?

[TrueBlueTerrier]

There probably is - However this is not an official site and, therefore, any "evidence" or "documentation" you are provided on here will NOT help your case because the source is unofficial, untrustworthy (in the eyes of the law) and not a True Copy.

If you wish to pursue this further then I suggest a no win no fee solicitor would be better.

Also, I believe, as an Admin on this board, that members naturally wishing to help you, who are still employed by Royal Mail may be placing themselves at risk if their responses are not well thought out and researched.

I may lock this topic, and delete posts from this point if I believe doing so protects our members, which is the overriding concern here.

[It's War]

I spoke to my postie this morning and he couldn't remember any specific training or printed material explaining expected practice in this situation. Other than they are not supposed to deliver a parcel in the street, but only at the door. Is RM really saying their delivery workers are untrained in this matter and what 'training' there might be is by word of mouth or a day or two in an office at the beginning or their career?