Paging Andy Hall

[Graeme]

Andy, your letter of complaint to Royal Mail must have been referred to The Top Man, as it is now possible to pay import duties, underpaid postage etc. on-line. Congratulations! :-)

[Andy Burns]

for import duties it has been for months, don't know about postage-to-pay

[Andy Hall]

I did refer the complaint to Postcomm but they have not yet acknowledged it either.

Do you have a URL for said payment service.?

[Graeme]

In message , Andy Hall writes

[Andy Hall]

Thank you Graeme. Yes I found it with a bit of looking on their site.

I also received a reply from RM yesterday as follows:

***** Dear Mr Hall

Thank you for your email regarding the collection of mail from your local delivery office.

I have looked into this matter and can only apologise for any inconvenience you may have been caused. I have been in contact with your local delivery office and they have confirmed that they do not offer car parking facilities for customers and that they do not have a counter indoors which can be used to collect parcels.

With regards to paying for the delivery of mail, i can confirm that we require payment before posting an item to an address and regret that you are unable to pay surcharges/customs charges directly to the postman. This is because it would pose a secuitity risk if postal staff were known to carry cash. We are at present trialing a service called Fee To Pay whereby customers can pay their surcharges or customs charges through the Royal Mail website and have the item delivered directly to their address. This facility has been operational from the 21st May.

Thank you for contacting me about this matter and I hope you will find my reply both helpful and informative. Please accept my apologies and if we can be of any more help, please contact us again."

******

I have asked them why they don't have a counter inside. This is a main post office in a town centre.

I have also asked them why they are making a charge of £1 for this service.

[Graeme]

I'm glad they did have the courtesy to reply, even though the reply was not terribly helpful. It did sound, though, as though the person replying had actually made enquiries.

Does sound odd. I can only think that the PO and sorting office are entirely separate (which they would, and should, be), even though they are within the same building, and collections are dealt with by Royal Mail staff, rather than PO staff. Here, we are a small office, and the only Royal Mail staff are the posties, who are out most of the time, so I, as sub postmaster, handle parcel collections whilst nominally wearing my Royal Mail hat :-)

Forgive me if I have misunderstood, but, having looked at the site again, I do feel that the part about the fee is poorly worded. There is, and always has been, a fee payable for underpaid postage. The current amount is one pound, and has been for at least five years. This is payable in addition to the amount of underpaid postage, and applies how and wherever the underpayment is paid. It does not apply to payments of customs duties, VAT etc., although there is a clearance fee which increased recently, from four pounds to eight pounds. However, that is payable however or wherever the duties are paid.

What I'm trying to say is that there is not an ADDITIONAL fee for paying online.

[Andy Hall]

One might have hoped that the organisations could have come to a simple commercial arrangement such that RM could rent some office space and a counter position....

Well... when I had the last debacle with them, the only payment listed was the import VAT. This was the straight 17.5% of the invoice value and nothing more. I didn't pay any additional handling fee or short postage fee.

I can understand it if they want to make a charge for missing or insufficient postage - that is fair enough. However, in this case, the

*postage* was there and paid in full by the sender. Only the VAT was due and that's all that was paid.

On their web site, they are at best unclear. If there is a payment for underpostage, that's OK, but they do not say that there isn't for a pure VAT collection. Perhaps that is not charged if I were to actually go to the site with a tracking number for an import. Either way they should clarify it and I have queried it with them.

[Graeme]

Please don't bring logic into a discussion involving Royal Mail ...

I would have thought it would be more simple to allow the PO staff to deal with parcel collections, but who knows how these systems operate. The big problem, as explained to me, is that the various divisions of the group (Royal Mail, Parcelfarce and PO) hate each other with a vengeance, and have done so ever since the break up of the GPO. Something to do with everyone thinking that everyone else got the best jobs. Combine that with a civil service mentality that is still circa

1967 and the odd problem is bound to arise occasionally.

The customs/VAT page and underpaid postage page should have been dealt with as entirely separate web pages, even though parts of the system are duplicated. I would have expected you to pay four pounds collection fee

- that fee is now eight pounds.

Understood.

An understatement.

Agreed. They should be dealt with entirely separately, to avoid just this kind of confusion. One problem is finding anyone who admits to administering the web site. The opening hours of my PO are incorrect on the PO web site, and have been for years. No-one, but no-one, will do anything about it. Anyone and everyone whom I have contacted has admitted any knowledge or responsibility. There are links on the site for help, but every respondee insists their job is to respond only to queries regarding products and services, not the site itself. I give up.