I had cause recently to send two letters using a service from the UK Post Office called ‘Recorded Delivery’ which is a tracked, ‘signed’ for service.
Sadly, neither document made it to their respective destinations, and I checked back to remind myself how previous use of the service had fared. In fact, of all the documents I have sent using this Royal Mail facility in the past 3 years, over 65% never arrived.
I’m happy to accept that this public, union dominated, relic of 1950’s statism is bloated, inefficient, ineffectual and completely devoid of any notion whatsoever of customer service. It’s how such organisations are.
What raised Grumpy’s ire is the pointless framework for seeking redress; irrational barriers are raised against the wronged claimant so that there is no economic logic in making a claim.
The whole point about a tracking system is that Royal Mail knows whether an item has been delivered or not. Since (as shown clearly on the tracking site) my items had not been so delivered, it is irritating to have to complete two pages of claim and submit original documentation in support of this self-evident fact. The simple outcome is that the time spent on conforming with these procedures to claim the postage of £1.23 renders it meaningless.
In fact, in a previous spate of vanishing deliveries I did submit a claim just out of irritation, complete with the forms and original documentation, which I sent by (you guessed it) Recorded Delivery. Predictably, that was lost as well. Now we get to the real catch22 – I sought to resubmit the claim, but of course now had no original receipt. The claim was accordingly rejected, even though they in fact lost it. Beyond belief.
This is an organisation that was granted £1 billion of taxpayers money in 2010. No wonder the union, the CWU, opposes any attempts to introduce market discipline by privatisation into this out-of-control gravy train .