Royal Mail: Performance Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business and Trade
Alex McIntyre
Main Page: Alex McIntyre (Labour - Gloucester)Department Debates - View all Alex McIntyre's debates with the Department for Business and Trade
Royal Mail: Performance
Alex McIntyre Excerpts(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)
The service provided by Royal Mail in my constituency is simply not good enough. Hundreds of residents have written to me over the past year with shocking, but unfortunately almost identical, stories. In the worst-affected areas of Abbeymead and Abbeydale, most residents I speak to do not get post for three to four weeks, only for a pile of letters to arrive at once. I know that to be true because I live there, and my post arrives monthly as well.
In Tuffley, Matson and Hempsted, they are experiencing similar issues: people are waiting on hospital appointments, new debit cards and other important post. I hope that most of the Mother’s Day cards have now arrived—I pray that all the Christmas cards have been delivered. Something has to change.
I want to be absolutely clear that this poor service is not down to our hard-working posties in Gloucester. I visited the Gloucester North delivery office last week and spoke with them, and they are working really hard in difficult conditions. The post arrives late from the Bristol sorting office; the posties are waiting later and later in the morning for that delivery from Bristol, which impacts how many hours they can deliver for. Parcels are being prioritised over post—that is what the posties tell me, but management are still denying it. The posties also told me in detail about the two-tier workforce system, which means that most staff now leave in six months.
To make matters worse, they are being undercut by other companies that pay their staff more. Amazon recently opened a large depot in Gloucester, and is paying £4 an hour more than Royal Mail offers. The Minister knows that I have been raising this repeatedly with the Department for Business and Trade. I have written to Ofcom, which still says that it is fining those companies and that will improve things. It will not; they are baking those fines into their business cases. Can we please give the regulator more teeth so that we can actually improve the service?