Mail ditches its 8am collection

The Royal Mail has scrapped early collections across most of London, provoking fears of a further deterioration in the already sub-standard postal service.

The traditional 8am collection from post boxes has been put back until midday in many post codes, in what the Royal Mail says are "efficiency-enhancing measures".

Post boxes in north, south and east London have already been affected in the runup to Christmas - even though it is the busiest time of the year for the Post Office.

With as many as three in 10 first-class letters delivered late in north and east London, the move has led consumer body PostWatch to voice concerns that there "may be a negative impact" on performance.

The watchdog supports the scheme but criticised the Royal Mail for failing to inform the public.

A PostWatch spokesman said: "They haven't bothered to make an effort to explain what they are doing. They didn't even tell us until we asked them what was going on."

The Royal Mail was today insisting the move will improve its heavily-criticised service in London, where first- and secondclass delivery standards are well short of target levels and the national average.

A spokesman for the struggling Post Office, which is having to make £1.2 billion cuts to keep the business intact, said: "It makes absolute practical operational sense for us. Only a limited number of post boxes have anything more than a small amount of mail posted first thing. We were wasting man hours and resources that can now be concentrated on sorting mail or working overtime later in the day.

"It makes more operational sense for us to get all our mail in our mail centres at the same time, so we can maximise our modern integral mail processes, which sort large amounts of post simultaneously.

"Mail processing is done at lunchtime, or in the afternoon, so the loss of an early collection will make no difference at all."

The familiar black indicators showing the times of collection have been removed from most of the capital's 5,000 post boxes to signal the change.

Reports that post boxes in the Clapham Common area of south London had been filling up since the scheme was introduced were dismissed by Royal Mail. It said over-flowing post boxes were caused by excessively large items of mail being jammed inside.

First collections will vary from area to area from about 9am to midday, depending on local demand. The Royal Mail is currently using barcode technology to quantify the volume of mail at different times of the day.