I have received an enormous volume of emails, phone calls and even letters regarding the poor performance of Royal Mail before, during and after Christmas and have read and taken on board all of your feedback and will be using it to raise specific issues with Royal Mail. As you no doubt know, and as many people mention in their emails, I met with Royal Mail managers at my office in Stratford on the 10th of December following the initial delivery issues experienced by people across the constituency. At this meeting Royal Mail blamed a number of issues including new routes and changes in working practices which meant that postal staff were spending less time in the office sorting and more time out delivering. They said that their calculations on routes hadn’t allowed for differing ages and abilities of individuals and other factors, nor a sudden increase in parcel traffic through Stratford over the previous year (up from 2,800 parcels per day on average to 7,500 per day this year compared to 4,000 last year). The initial flurry of snow was also blamed for both the increase in postal traffic and the delays. At the meeting Royal Mail confirmed that they had cleared their original backlog which had reached 25,000 items and that they were on track and would do everything possible to deliver all post received into the sorting office before Christmas Eve. After the Christmas period, when postal volumes had returned to normal, I was assured that they would review their planning assumptions which were used to redesign the routes and which caused the initial issues in the first place. Since then we had another significant snow fall, which Royal Mail blamed on creating a larger backlog and stopping them from delivering post. The snow obviously affected the entire country and we are not the only area to have been affected however it appears to have only made the earlier issues worse. The snow though cannot be purely to blame as other delivery services appear to have been more than capable of getting packages from elsewhere in the country to Stratford homes. Even on the local level if the milkman and paper boy can get through then one must question why an organisation the size of Royal Mail couldn’t. In the run-up to Christmas I received a large volume of emails from individuals concerned that they had still not received packages and letters ordered and posted well within Royal Mail’s Christmas delivery timescales, and I ensured that Royal Mail were aware of the issues being experienced on the ground here in Stratford. As you may have read in the local press, Royal Mail confirmed that their staff were doing everything they could under difficult conditions. Unfortunately they failed to deliver their original undertaking to clear their backlog before Christmas day and it appears that the post is still far from back to normal, with what is clearly a very large backlog existing at the sorting office and haphazard deliveries across the area. I have requested another meeting with Royal Mail, this time at their sorting office, to see the problems first hand and get a clear understanding of what has happened, hopefully not just from managers but from those working on the ground out delivering as well. It is also my intention to raise a number of very concerning issues that have been raised with me by constituents, including the way newer mail appears to be being prioritised over older mail and the lack of communication from the sorting office to the general public. I hope to hold this meeting this week. I have also written again to Royal Mail’s Chief Executive to ensure that the most Senior Management in the organisation know of the issues being experienced at a local level. Resolving this issue and ensuring that the correct individuals are held to account over Royal Mail’s failure to deliver and communicate in this instance is one of my main priorities at the moment, and I will ensure that as I receive more information I keep you up to date.