The country’s consumer champion has raised the Dundee East Christmas mail shambles with Royal Mail.
A Consumer Focus Scotland spokesperson said, “We have been in regular contact with Royal Mail over the problems postal consumers in Dundee East have been experiencing.
“We raised the issue at a meeting with Royal Mail representatives last week, when they outlined the action taken to address the problems and the lessons that have been learnt.
“We will continue to monitor the situation in the coming weeks and urge any consumers still experiencing problems with their mail service to contact Royal Mail and make a formal complaint.”
The involvement of Consumer Focus, which absorbed the dedicated mail watchdog Postwatch, follows the disclosure the Royal Mail executive responsible implementing its new working system throughout the UK visited Dundee East depot to find out why the December service had gone so disastrously wrong.
Paul Tolhurst, Royal Mail’s field operations director, turned up at the beleaguered depot last week in the wake of the controversy over its mountain of undelivered mail.The Way ForwardThe crisis, which Royal Mail blamed first on problems with The Way Forward delivery arrangements and then on the bad weather, ruined the festive season for thousands in DD4/DD5 postcode areas whose Christmas cards and mail-ordered presents did not arrive on time.
Royal Mail drafted in workers from across the UK to help clear the backlog at its worst more than 100,000 items.
Parcels were even delivered on Sundays to deal with the problem.
However, even these measures did not work without incident, with visiting and agency personnel delivering large quantities of mail to the wrong homes by mistake or not delivering it at all.
Royal Mail apologised to its customers in the area for letting them down, promised a thorough investigation and said lessons would be learned. The backlog was finally cleared early last week, nearly a month after Christmas.
We have been inundated with complaints from readers about late and missing mail, with many speaking of their exasperation with Royal Mail. They were also frustrated at their complaints going unanswered.
We inquired about the number of customers seeking compensation, but were told that such figures are not available.