A ROYAL Mail whistleblower has claimed residents in Colchester are suffering postal delays due to "poor" decision making by the company. 

The ex-employee from Colchester, who worked as a postman and at a distribution centre in Chelmsford, has lifted the lid on the inner workings of Royal Mail.

It comes after countless residents in the city reported being left without mail for weeks on end, with some missing important hospital appointments as a result. 

The former worker believes the lack of post being delivered is down to bad business decisions and overworked staff. 

They claim full-time staff are being replaced by cheaper, part-time workers in order to save money. 

Gazette:

He said: “There’s a lot of change in employees. They are getting rid of people like me who work full-time because we cost money. 

“But with the new staff, who only work part-time, of course, they cost the company less, but they’re also losing the company experience.” 

Having worked for the postal service for more than 30 years, the former postie believes the changes being implemented by Royal Mail are making the job of being a postie even more difficult. 

“I’m just upset that they are destroying the postal service just to gain money from it," he added.

"We postmen, we love our job, and we care. 

“We care about getting people their mail, but it’s just difficult to do it with all the decisions made higher up.” 

While working at the Chelmsford distribution site, which collects deliveries for the Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich, he also claims the process was dealing with tracked parcels was ignored. 

“Usually, when a parcel is out for delivery, it would be scanned, but they are not doing that," the whistleblower added.

"So, it looks to people like their parcel is still at the distribution site when it is already on its way.” 

Colchester residents have complained about irregular and untimely deliveries of letters, leading to people waiting weeks for much-needed documents. 

According to the whistleblower, the Colchester depot in Moorside was “horrific” at times, with piles of mail going undelivered for weeks on end.

Ahead of visits from Royal Mail inspectors, however, the undelivered mail would be given to an employee to deal with on top of their normal work, making it impossible to get all deliveries to recipients in a timely manner.

Gazette: Colchester has been struggling with Royal Mail post delays

He added: “I’ve worked for Royal Mail for 35 years, and I saw how it is being destroyed."

“They only care about pleasing their shareholders and customers are paying the price for the failures of the company.” 

It was further claimed, that there were rumours about decreasing the number of days to deliver letters from six to five and using the sixth day only for parcels.

A Royal Mail spokesman said: "At Royal Mail we are proud to have the best terms and conditions in our industry, with the average tenure for Royal Mail employees at 18 years.

"As a result, our turnover of staff is well below the industry average – 11% at Royal Mail compared to 26.9% across the logistics sector.

“Almost 80% of the team in Colchester Delivery Office are full-time employees and as a business we are increasing recruitment of permanent employees and reducing reliance on agency staff.

“The rumours you have heard on changes to deliveries are inaccurate. As part of our proposal to Ofcom on the future of the Universal Service, we have said that we are committed to retaining First Class deliveries six days a week. Parcels can be delivered up to seven days a week, as they are today.”