| |
Royal Mail extortion
• WHAT on earth is the management of the Royal Mail delivery office playing at?
One day last week I found on my mat a card declaring that an item of mail could not be delivered because the sender had not attached enough stamps.
He was, in fact, a mere 6p short. I was at home when this missive came, but my bell was not rung.
I was required to pay not just double that sum, as in the past, but £1 – not to take it from the postie, who was not empowered to receive money (as in the past) – but in order to have it redelivered.
The letter turned out to be an urgent request for a reference, so my unfortunate correspondent was delayed in making an important application.
One way of paying this unjust amount was to attach stamps for £1.06 to the card, entailing a long wait in a post office queue to obtain those if I didn’t want to risk using stamps I already had and getting the value wrong, probably overpaying in the attempt.
So I went to the delivery office to pay, and collect, and found a queue of five people in front of me, all of whom had the same card.
All of them had likewise been indoors when the postie left it without ringing.
Of course, we all had to pay the outrageous £1 to receive letters and packages it was our legal right to have. We concluded that this was little better than a Royal Mail scam designed to raise money from the public. On top of the hopelessly erratic delivery times, the constant misdelivery of mail and the impossibility of getting reply to reasoned letters addressed to the management in Shepherd’s Walk, this kind of petty extortionate behaviour on behalf of a public service seems a bit much.
ALAN BROWNJOHN
Belsize Park, NW3
|
 |
|
|
| |
| |
