We’re hearing that some may not be getting their normal collections over the next couple of days, while we’ve not spotted any updates on courier sites, a Royal Mail weather warning has been issued.
Royal Mail weather warning
The Met Office has issued an extreme heat red weather warning for Monday 18 and Tuesday 19 July. Whilst we will do everything we can to keep services running during this exceptional weather, there may be areas where there is some disruption to service.
In areas where temperatures rise to potentially dangerous levels during the day, our staff have been advised to return to the office with any mail they have been unable to deliver and not put themselves under any risk of falling ill due to the extreme heat. The safety of our staff is paramount during this time. Thank you for your understanding.
– Royal Mail
What the Royal Mail weather warning hasn’t done is put any parameters around when they may or may not be working, but we hear from a source that the magic number is 35 degrees C. Managers are reported to be checking Met Office reports on an hourly basis to ensure they can keep staff updated.
We’re also hearing that the main Royal Mail collections hub in Chelmsford may be closed until 8pm when work will resume. We’ve not been able to verify this, but it would be no surprise to hear that some buildings, especially when located in the hottest areas of the country, have work suspended to protect staff.
Hopefully, disruption to collections will be kept to a minimum as ecommerce retailers will be eager to get their parcels from the weekend’s sales today. But don’t be surprised if you get a call from your collection manager informing you that nothing is going to move today.
7 Responses
Wouldn’t have a problem with any of this, but the first we heard about the cancellation was an hour after our collection time had passed when I called them to ask what was going on.
They agreed we should have been notified, at the very least this is what we’d have expected.
Nottingham had no collections in my area… never got told! Got told by viewing Facebook…
We’re hearing if you didn’t get a collection today, it’s almost certain you now won’t have one until Wednesday
Very poor service. We sat around for an hour yesterday waiting for our collection which didnt arrive. No notification from anyone that yesterdays and todays collections were cancelled. We took ours down to the royal mail depot this morning and they scanned them and took them off us. The collection sise really need to get a grip of things and make it easier to cancel/amend our collections. Evri, DPD and Amazon still appear to be working as normal.
“Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail shall keep the postmen from their appointed rounds.“
Absolutely disgraceful customer service from Royal Mail with no warning or even communication regarding yesterday’s collections and also that there will be no collections today either. Dispatched Staff with sacks of orders to the local sorting office at 17.00 last night and it was shut up tight and staff had gone home. Visited the sorting office this morning staff were apologetic but didn’t seem overly concerned. How an organisation this size can operate like this in today’s world is beyond me.
Royal Mail have informed on the phone that there were no collection / deliveries yesterday and the same today, Tuesday. They hope to resume tomorrow.
Ebay are aware of this. I asked Ebay Customer Services on the phone an hour ago if they send warning messages / emails to buyers warning of postage delivery delays due to the weather and they replied “Of course Ebay does not do things like that, which you would think are simple things, so that makes our job much more difficult”. You would think Ebay would help sellers in this way, because we will get complaints “My order is late, my order never turned up.” But no, unfortunately Ebay management don’t really care in helping buyers and sellers in this way, which is a pity.