Royal Mail Compensation Signed For changes

Category: News
Royal Mail Compensation Signed For changes Takeback Tuesday

In their consultation, Royal Mail compensation for Signed For letters and parcels is due to be slashed from the current £50 down to £20 – the same as for a 1st or 2nd Class letter.

Signed For products (Signed For First and Second class) are aimed at sending customers who require a signature on delivery, but do not necessarily require the increased level of compensation. Therefore, we intend to realign the compensation level of our Signed For products to our other untracked services.

– Royal Mail

This probably won’t be an issue for most ecommerce operations as Signed For is a legacy product (and one incidentally that we suspect Royal Mail would like to phase out as soon as they can. It sits alongside more robust offerings such as Tracked and Special Delivery which are often pretty much the same price or cheaper for all but the lightest packages.

There’s also good news for Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 – for the first time Royal Mail plan to make the services available at the Post Office. Currently, while you can buy the service online, your only despatch options are your local Delivery Office, a Parcel Postbox, or a Royal Mail collection.

Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 services are currently available to consumers via our online channels. We plan to make these available to purchase via all channels, including through Post Office. This will include a ‘Signed For’ variant. The compensation level of Tracked items includes £150 for loss or damage, has a photograph taken on delivery and has the delivery location identified on a map.

– Royal Mail

Royal Mail have also confirmed expansion of their Capture a Photo On Delivery capability in lieu of signatures, including on some products covered by the UK Post Scheme (for example on Special Delivery Guaranteed items).

Safe Place will give permission to leave packages in safe, secure and weatherproof location at the discretion of the Delivery Officer. Normally this has been at the request of the customer but will now be routine with an Opt Out instead of an Opt In.

Royal Mail say that results of the automatic redelivery trial were very positive, with a high number of parcels being successfully redelivered automatically and so have rolled out automatic redelivery across the UK from the 2nd of May 2023.

Finally, it’s worth noting that in April 2023 Royal Mail increased the level of compensation cover from £500 to £750.

The changes above are all noted in the Royal Mail consultation that closes on the 2nd of June 2023.

5 Responses

  1. As John said above, except at MY local Post Office they only started accepting RM Tracked about 2 months ago. I suspect there is a lack of communication all round…

  2. our local post office
    are favourite to win the inter galactic jobsworth award,
    the staff have titanium postal size gauges, with defence systems set up around their parcel scales,
    soon they will need crowd control for the queues

  3. sadly you cannot get tracked 24 or 48 on a letter, so you will have to pay the large letter rate to get above £20 coverage. So a Signed For 90g letter with £50 coverage is currently £2.60 and a 90g Tracked 24 large letter with £100 coverage is £4.80. Its a big uplift for letters that need the extra cover. But remember cover only works with proof of value ie the original purchase receipt, the do not cover “profit”.

  4. There will be losers here for letter size items well above £20 but not valuable enough for Special D. So this is a bad move for some customers

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