Plymouth Letter - Royal Mail post deliv­er­ies really are a dis­grace

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-plym ... 1146733447

I WAS inter­ested to read MP Luke Pol­lard’s appeal in The Her­ald regard­ing Royal Mail’s recent deliv­ery record.

In addi­tion to The Her­ald, we order a copy of a magazine called The Week each week. It’s sup­posed to arrive on a Fri­day but it can be sev­eral days, or even a whole week late.

I know two people loc­ally who have can­celled their sub­scrip­tion because, in this world dom­in­ated by instant digital news, they’re fed up get­ting their news that late.

I cor­res­pon­ded with The Week’s editor and he apo­lo­gised and said it was their fault for using Royal Mail.

It’s still an issue though. Cur­rently we get one or two postal deliv­er­ies a week. One day, a couple of months ago, we had 18 items of post delivered in one day. Need­less to say it was our first deliv­ery in a while and six, yes six, of the items were identical let­ters from Vir­gin all sup­posed pos­ted on the same day, which was exactly two weeks before they were delivered.

The last point is rel­ev­ant because an acquaint­ance of mine is about to go to court with his son because his son com­mit­ted a traffic light offence and failed to pay the fine within a two-week win­dow. The prob­lem being that the police simply refuse to believe that a let­ter they claim was writ­ten on one day would take more than two weeks to actu­ally arrive at its des­tin­a­tion.

It cer­tainly doesn’t sur­prise me. I was however sur­prised recently when I received an £85 park­ing fine for a two-hour ses­sion in Sains­bury’s Armada Way that I paid for.

I quer­ied the fine, sent proof of my phone pay­ment and was told I’d nev­er­the­less made a mis­take so would still have to pay a fine, just £20 though.

I was still unaware of any mis­de­mean­our and quer­ied it again. This time they showed me details of a pay­ment that had been made against a regis­tra­tion plate that didn’t exist, but which they sug­ges­ted may have been mine as four of the char­ac­ters matched my plate. I had keyed in the open­ing num­bers of my wife’s regis­tra­tion plate and the rest were mine.

Now I was aware of my error, but now I could no longer pay £20. I appealed to the Ombuds­man. The reply inac­cur­ately picked up on my error and said because I had entered my wife’s num­ber and not mine, then they had no record of pay­ment.

But I had provided suf­fi­cient char­ac­ters from my regis­tra­tion for the com­pany them­selves to work out what had happened, so they did have a record and moreover one that exactly matched the time of my pur­chase.

Have I been able to speak to a human being about this? Abso­lutely not.

Would a car park attend­ant have flagged this as a fine­able offence if he/she had seen an appro­pri­ately timed ticket dis­played? Hope­fully not, but we are liv­ing in a world where machines rule the world, and if you can get machines to do the work for you, why not?

The Her­ald repor­ted that nation­ally car park­ing com­pan­ies have been col­lect­ing up to £4.6mil­lion a day in fines.

In 2019, par­lia­ment approved a bill to reg­u­late the industry. To date the bill hasn’t been passed and in the mean­time the fines go on.

Who reg­u­lates them, who allows them to charge me £155, more than half my weekly state pen­sion, and more than a speed­ing fine. And what crime have I com­mit­ted? None, I’ve just had a ‘senior moment.’

And talk­ing of speed­ing fines, I have been driv­ing, safely I like to think, without caus­ing any major acci­dents, for over 55 years.

Across the first 50 years or so I received one speed­ing ticket, in the last year I have had three. All on dual car­riage­ways, although one was on a dualled sec­tion of a single car­riage­way, all for going no more than 81 miles an hour.

A fair cop, yes, obvi­ously, but again, talk­ing to friends, it seems that most people I know have had at least one or two tick­ets in the last year or two, most, to be fair, vic­tims of 20 mph zones.

Hope­fully the roads are now safer, and there are fewer acci­dents, but the main feed­back I’m get­ting is that people are avoid­ing those roads alto­gether and find­ing ‘rat runs’ that simply move the danger else­where.

So maybe not the out­come that was hoped for, but another great rev­enue earner.

My main worry is that life is becom­ing increas­ingly frus­trat­ing, irrit­at­ing and vex­a­tious. Indeed, while typ­ing this I received a bank fraud scam call on my land­line!

The prob­lem is that as people seek to blame someone for all the ills of the mod­ern world they will look increas­ingly to those politi­cians who are keen to point fin­gers and blame oth­ers, not those politi­cians who show com­pas­sion, care and under­stand­ing.

I worry for my grand­chil­dren.

Chris Robin­son