By bizn_fun 
There are significantly more parcels at Christmas, and plenty of customers agree that parcels should be prioritised over those few weeks. Royal Mail insists that things are now getting back to normal after that unusually busy period, but their staff don’t agree.
Most of the Royal Mail staff we spoke to told us that since January overtime has been restricted to next to nothing. Meanwhile some rounds are not being delivered for weeks while posties are on annual leave.
A Royal Mail spokesperson said overtime was reviewed regularly, and a reduction after Christmas was to be expected, but performance was monitored on a daily basis.
The second postman to speak to the BBC, who we are calling Bob, said the reason people were not getting post on time was simple: “There’s not enough staff.”
“It gets worse after Christmas, because during Christmas they employ a whole team of staff which makes the whole office kind of manageable,” he said.
Right now, Bob said: “Every day there’s mail left behind, one, maybe two, maybe three rounds which are not covered… The tracked recorded parcels are done every day, because they make a difference to the stats for the office, but anything that’s not tracked every day there’ll be mail that’s not going out.”
The regulator Ofcom says it has fined Royal Mail £37m in recent years for its poor letter delivery performance and “will continue to hold the company to account”.