POSTAL
SERVICE
The postal service has been implicated in one way or another quite
a lot on the programme – cheques that got lost, tax discs
that didn’t arrive, and credit card bills that arrived too
late to avoid penalties. Here is one example...
...what about the cheque from
Land of Leather that was, we’d
been assured last week, in the post! Alison has been waiting for
a refund of her £800 deposit since early December 2003.
Well that cheque eventually did arrive – it turned out that
Land of Leather hadn’t put enough postage on it! But by that
time they’d cancelled the cheque and promised to issue another – and
Alison is still waiting for it.
So we rang Land of Leather again to find out what’s going
on – and they say another cheque was sent out recorded delivery
on Monday – We’ve seen proof of postage, but it still
hasn’t arrived, and Land of Leather says the Royal Mail says,
it could take up to 15 days as there are delays for deliveries
between GB and N Ireland.
The Royal Mail said in a statement to On Your Behalf
" There are currently
no problems with mail deliveries to or from Northern Ireland.
We deliver around 2 million
items of mail every
day in Northern Ireland alone. The vast majority are delivered
on time and without difficulty and the percentage of items reported
lost is a minute percentage of the total volume of mail we handle.
Although we do all we reasonable can to ensure the safety of all
mail in the course of transit, it is often not possible to say
precisely how or why an individual item of mail has been delayed
or has gone astray, due to the large volume of letters and packets
that we handle on a daily basis.
However, we are concerned to hear about any item that has not been
delivered, particularly where a customer has taken the trouble
to use our Recorded Delivery service.
Recorded Delivery is an add on to the First and Second Class services
whereby a signature is obtained and a record made of the time of
delivery. Recorded Delivery mail is processed along with the ordinary
mail and is not electronically tracked.
Royal Mail is one of the few postal companies in the world to pay
compensation for the delay to mail. However, under the scheme,
an item of mail is not deemed to be lost until after 15 days have
elapsed.
Anyone with any concerns about mail that may have been
lost or delayed or who would like details of Royal Mail's compensation
scheme should contact our
Customer Service Centre on
Tel: 08457 740 740
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