Royal Mail Sorting Office Closure Meeting..

[Sue]

ynwa Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> This is happening on Wednesday:

> http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.

> aspx?CId=176&MId=6062&Ver=4

>

> I can?t go unfortunately but would very much

> appreciate feedback on the Royal Mail content from

> those who can attend.

I was hoping to go to this, but now can't go either.

Feedback would be brilliant.

[ed26]

@jimbo1964 - you can usually ask Amazon via their chat help to issue a return label for a different method, if the default option isn't convenient. Barry's Food Store is a Collect+ and East Dulwich Store on Crystal Palace Road is a Pass My Parcel. Amazon have sent me labels for both of these options in the past.

[Sue]

jimbo1964 Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Also returning an Amazon Prime is a nightmare. You

> have to take it back to the delivery office!

That's a bit weird.

Why would you take something which you are sending out of the area to the delivery office?

Normally the delivery offices only deal with items coming into their area, to be delivered there (hence their name!)

In my experience, items being returned to their sender via Royal Mail are taken to a Post Office? Has the system been changed?

[Bic Basher]

Seems to be the second person on EDF who has said they had to use the delivery office, as ed26 mentions, there are other options for returns.

Once Amazon even booked a courier to return a package from my flat at 9am!

[Sue]

So can anybody report back from the meeting?

[Penguin68]

Yesterday we had 12 items of mail, all delivered initially to the wrong address - many thanks to the very kind lady who took the trouble to walk up and re-deliver to us. Unfortunately I could not make the meeting, somehow I feel it will have been a master class in weasel words and obfuscation, but I would love to be proved wrong.

Amended to say - the road numbering is classic ODDS on one side, EVENS on the other. In my part of the road there are no confusing apartment blocks with their own numbering scheme. My number has no 'a' or 'b's - i.e. not a split residence. So, basically, no excuses other than laziness or ineptness.

[OutOfFocus]

We had 4 items, 3 intended for next door. Numbering in road is odd, which the regular postman knew.

[kiera]

The Royal Mail representative was the person who actually made the decision to close Silvester Rd. He only took up his post around June or July and seems to have made the decision almost immediately because he said (repeatedly) that the East Dulwich office could never cope at Christmas - every Christmas there was a call out to other offices to help out with their post. Someone sensibly asked why he couldn't have simply transferred part of Silvester Rd's area to Peckham to reduce their load to a size they could manage. That hadn't occured to him as an option, as it's Royal Mail's policy to close and merge offices. He closed it when he did, so that, at Christmas, they won't have to help them out with staff from other offices or temporary postmen!! He was asked if he considered it had been successful and he did think it was. He was told in no uncertain terms, by the public, councillors and Helen Hayes that the whole thing had been handled disastrously.

However, SE21's woes were heard next, and our problems were nothing to theirs, which were absolutely shocking - people's credit cards and bank statements stolen, duplicate PINs applied for and huge amounts of cash taken from their accounts with banks initially refusing to reimburse because they were accused of not keeping PIN numbers secure. Each case was treated as an isolated incident by Royal Mail, so they didn't pick up that it was all coming from the same delivery office. It took the residents to realise they were not alone in their loss, coordinate all the cases and present the evidence to their councillor and Helen Hayes before Royal Mail got the message. A worker has since been sacked, but now another staff member, the manager I believe, has been suspended after sacks of old mail were found in locked cupboard. Residents wanted reassurance there wasn't a ring of crooks operating there.

What the residents had to say was far more telling than anything the rep had to offer. He said our post will be back to normal in s couple of weeks - if anyone was still listening.

[Burbage]

Sue Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> So can anybody report back from the meeting?

Dulwich Community Council Forum - 31-10-18

Agenda Item 3: Royal Mail - Deliveries in Dulwich

Craig Wallace, an Operations Manager from Royal Mail attended to speak, very genially, about "postal deliveries in the Dulwich Area". He began with an inspiring statistical summary of the vast Royal Mail empire, almost as if to emphasise how small a part of the vast private empire the Dulwich Area is, and how insignificant our problems are in the broad scale of things.

Not that we have problems. For the Peckham sorting office is a thing of beauty, full of space and light and air and computerisation that, being no longer reliant on humans putting things in alphabetical order, was now a humming, hyper-efficient, beacon of the Future on the humble Highshore Road; a new place of pilgrimage and a physical demonstration of the sheer efficiencies that can be leveraged when gifted souls such as he, the latter-day Napoleons of the Post, turn their benevolent countenances to shine on the smaller delivery offices. He recited the new opening hours, as if to prove the point.

Before he'd finished, the Chair of the meeting, Cllr Andy Simmons (Labour, Dulwich Wood), intervened. At least 10 of the allotted 15 minutes had gone already, and it was more than possible people might have questions.

And questions they had, for the next hour and a quarter.

There were questions about post not arriving, a week's worth arriving all at once, 'you were out' cards delivered to those who were in, post only half-pushed through the letterbox, fraud, stolen post in particular and general, old cards directing people to the shuttered Silvester Road, queues at the Peckham office, whether the move was deemed a 'success' and whether 'sorry' was as hard a word as rumoured.

We never got an answer to the last. But all the others were variously the fault of the old building, the permanent staff, the temporary staff, staff sickness, the operations team, the move itself, outdated practices, the previous Operations Manager, the amount of post we insist on receiving, the Security Team and Customer Service. The only person to come up smelling of roses, it seemed, was the current Operations Manager.

Who, to be fair, did very well. It can't be easy hear words like 'chaos', 'failure' and 'contempt' thrown at you for an hour by upstanding souls such as councillors, an MP and the Neighbourhood Watch. Or listen to the impressively varied catalogue of failures contributed from the floor. Or the moving testimonies from victims of postal fraud, or those who said how they 'used to love the Royal Mail', but were now thinking twice about relying on the post ever again. Nevertheless, he managed to wrinkle his brow at some of the right moments and not smirk too much at the wrong ones.

When asked about the detail of the planning process, or what reasons there were for moving the whole area to the Peckham Office, rather than just the part of it nearest Peckham (7 million reasons, according to mutterings from the floor), he earnestly denied any knowledge of anything, that being the work of his predecessor, or the team, or the person whose job it was, or people superior to him. But he promised to take notes anyway.

The good news is that, despite everything being everyone else's fault, he hopes to be meeting the Universal Service Obligation within the next couple of weeks (perhaps), there's both a court case and a disciplinary in the pipeline, more staff are being recruited and he's stumbled on the revelation that vehicles, rather than trollies, might get letters around a bit quicker.

The bad news, should there be any, is still in the post.

[Sue]

Thanks Kiera.

That is ridiculous.

There was no indication at all before the decision to close the office was taken that the problem was only at Christmas, otherwise obviously other options could have been suggested. Sledgehammers and nuts spring to mind.

How is he suggesting that our post will be "back to normal in a couple of weeks"? Did he say what measures they are putting in place to do that, and what does he consider "normal", I wonder?

As regards SE21, that is horrifying. I hope the person responsible for the thefts has not just been sacked, but that the police are involved?

Royal Mail used to have their own Investigation Department, and it investigated things like several thefts from the same office (I am gobsmacked that this wasn't identified. Surely the information must have been relayed to the manager - however it seems that he wasn't exactly doing his job either).

Offices used to have watching galleries for the use of investigation staff in following up suspicions (though obviously the thefts may not have occurred actually in the office).

I am cynically supposing that following privatisation the Investigation Department has been disbanded to "save money"? If not, it does not seem to be doing its job properly.

ETA: Sorry, Burbage's post intervened whilst I was typing this!

[JohnL]

kiera Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> The Royal Mail representative was the person who

> actually made the decision to close Silvester Rd.

> He only took up his post around June or July and

> seems to have made the decision almost immediately

> because he said (repeatedly) that the East Dulwich

> office could never cope at Christmas - every

> Christmas there was a call out to other offices to

> help out with their post. Someone sensibly asked

> why he couldn't have simply transferred part of

> Silvester Rd's area to Peckham to reduce their

> load to a size they could manage. That hadn't

> occured to him as an option, as it's Royal Mail's

> policy to close and merge offices. He closed it

> when he did, so that, at Christmas, they won't

> have to help them out with staff from other

> offices or temporary postmen!! He was asked if he

> considered it had been successful and he did think

> it was. He was told in no uncertain terms, by the

> public, councillors and Helen Hayes that the whole

> thing had been handled disastrously.

> However, SE21's woes were heard next, and our

> problems were nothing to theirs, which were

> absolutely shocking - people's credit cards and

> bank statements stolen, duplicate PINs applied for

> and huge amounts of cash taken from their accounts

> with banks initially refusing to reimburse because

> they were accused of not keeping PIN numbers

> secure. Each case was treated as an isolated

> incident by Royal Mail, so they didn't pick up

> that it was all coming from the same delivery

> office. It took the residents to realise they were

> not alone in their loss, coordinate all the cases

> and present the evidence to their councillor and

> Helen Hayes before Royal Mail got the message. A

> worker has since been sacked, but now another

> staff member, the manager I believe, has been

> suspended after sacks of old mail were found in

> locked cupboard. Residents wanted reassurance

> there wasn't a ring of crooks operating there.

> What the residents had to say was far more

> telling than anything the rep had to offer. He

> said our post will be back to normal in s couple

> of weeks - if anyone was still listening.

I got bank mail interfered with at Peckham Rye last year after having my cards stolen and fraudulently used - a young man even came to the door pretending to deliver asking me to sign for a bankcard on a piece of A4 paper - he came in to my flat to rather than waiting at the door (my bank confirmed they just use normal mail for bankcards). I ended up sending Pins/Cards etc. to the bank branch that time as I lost trust in my mail delivery.

[singalto]

I am the one who asked why the roads nearest to Peckham couldn?t have been transferred to Highshoreroad leaving Sylvester rd with a smaller area to service. Craig Wallace seemed baffled by the question. He said posties can?t carry parcels as they no longer use trolleys: they do. The three Royal Mail Guys present were not impressed by the amount of nonsense Mr Wallace came up with. The transfer to Peckham (according to him) means the staff now have wonderful facilities but when I asked why we didn?t have the same posties as before he said there was a lot of staff sickness! He could be a politician as he was very good at taking a long time to say nothing and blamed everyone else for the failures.

[uncleglen]

kiera Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

.......Someone sensibly asked

> why he couldn't have simply transferred part of

> Silvester Rd's area to Peckham to reduce their

> load to a size they could manage. That hadn't

> occured to him as an option, as it's Royal Mail's

> policy to close and merge offices. He closed it

> when he did, so that, at Christmas, they won't

> have to help them out with staff from other

> offices or temporary postmen!! He was asked if he

> considered it had been successful and he did think

> it was. He was told in no uncertain terms, by the

> public, councillors and Helen Hayes that the whole

> thing had been handled disastrously.......

Says it all really- the bottom line and the shareholders RULE....It was obviously a 'success' because they got ?7 million for the site....

I must say that I am totally deterred from buying anything online now unless it is has a click and collect option...

[intexasatthe moment]

Yes ,a tremor of concern went through me yesterday when GP referring me for a scan pronounced the words "You'll get a letter ..."

[Sue]

intexasatthe moment Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Yes ,a tremor of concern went through me yesterday

> when GP referring me for a scan pronounced the

> words "You'll get a letter ..."

I would phone the scan place up (after a reasonable time) if I were you, just to be on the safe side.

A letter from a hospital recently took well over a week to get to me - my GP (in Herne Hill, so not the same delivery office) had received a copy long before I did. Luckily it wasn't related to a forthcoming appointment but the report on one which I'd already had.

[intexasatthe moment]

Kiera and Burbage thank you so much for taking the time to err ,post .

Burbage your description made me laugh out loud and cheered me up no end . Huge thank you .

[intexasatthe moment]

Yes that's my plan Sue .But somewhat irked that I might need to waste both mine and, more importantly ,the depts time doing this because the post is so unreliable .

[JohnL]

So why not increase the amount of staff dealing with parcels at Peckham or have a "triage" person making sure people in the queue know if they will be served and are ready with ID and their "missed you" note.

[Sue]

singalto Wrote:

- when I

> asked why we didn?t have the same posties as

> before he said there was a lot of staff sickness!

I'm not surprised. They are probably all off with stress!

My postie yesterday told me "you don't know the half of it"!

[Dulwich Born And Bred]

Did he say anything about the redeliveries?

[singalto]

According to him, everything is going to be perfect within a couple of weeks! If you want to complain, email [email protected]...

[Dulwich Born And Bred]

With Christmas next month....I highly doubt it will be anywhere near perfect!

[Dulwich Born And Bred]

Thanks for the email address. I?ve complained!

[Sue]

singalto Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> According to him, everything is going to be

> perfect within a couple of weeks! If you want to

> complain, email [email protected]...

Thanks for that. He is going to hear from me too :))

[OutOfFocus]

We've had a recorded delivery dropped through doorbox unrecorded.