The House of Commons has been told of the “shambolic” state of mail deliveries in Dundee East.
Dundee East MP Stewart Hosie, who raised the issue as a point of order, asked the Speaker of House John Bercow if he could order Vince Cable, the minister for business, innovation and skills, to answer questions on the Way Forward before the Royal Mail’s controversial new delivery system is rolled out elsewhere in the country.
He said the implementation of the system in his constituency had been “shambolic” for two months, with many constituents receiving late mail or no mail at all.
Mr Bercow said he had no such powers to order Mr Cable, but pointed out that the minister will be in the House on Thursday for oral questions and he looked forward to seeing the Dundee East member on that occasion.
Afterwards, Mr Hosie said he was keen to raise the issue on the floor of the house as the new system has been a problem in Dundee East and would be a problem elsewhere if rolled out.
“I will keep the pressure up on the government to ensure Royal Mail deploy a set of working practices which work, and I intend to raise this issue at ministerial level on Thursday,” he said.
The Way Forward involves letters and parcels being delivered together in longer rounds by teams of postmen and women, and in Dundee East its operation led to a massive backlog of mail.
A union leader is calling on Royal Mail to review the system to prevent the problems being repeated elsewhere.
Willie Lawson, area representative of the Communication Workers’ Union, said the review should start as soon as the mail backlog is cleared a target which Royal Mail hope to achieve by the end of this week.
However, Royal Mail said they have already investigated the problem and are now going through the issues their probe identified.
Mr Lawson said, “The main problem at Dundee East is that the staff there can only cope with what they can cope with. Dundee East is staffed to cope with something like 30,000 items of mail a day, but if something like 50,000 items are coming through then there is going to be a problem.
“A backlog is going to build up and it is going to be hard to clear that backlog if the same thing is going to be happening day after day.
“We think there may be problems in the system in that the amount of mail coming through is not being recorded as accurately as it used to be, so first of all we need to record how much mail is coming through to that depot on a regular basis.
“When we know that like if there are 50,000 items coming through when there’s only staff to cope with 30,000 then that would be a start.”