Last week a survey by postal watchdog, Postwatch, said 10 out of 14 postcode areas in the south and west of England, including Swindon, were not meeting their targets for achieving next day delivery of first class mail. ANTHONY OSBORNE conducted his own test and the results were remarkably good...

A SURVEY carried out by the Evening Advertiser has shown that most first class mail sent from the town is reaching its destination on time.

To test whether mail sent from Swindon was reaching its addressee the next day, we sent out 30 letters from Old Town to both local addresses and other destinations across the UK on Tuesday.

Of the 30 letters, 29 reached their destination the next day. One letter intended for the Buchan Observer newspaper in the distant Scottish fishing town of Peterhead had still not arrived yesterday morning.

The closest destination was Western Street in Old Town, while the most distant was Dornoch, north of Inverness 616 miles from Swindon.

This means that the Swindon postcode area managed to achieve a first class next day delivery rate of around 96.7 per cent, higher than the 92.4 per cent average for the South West in the survey carried out by Postwatch.

Last week's survey found that staff in 10 out of 14 postcode areas in the south and west of England were not meeting their targets for the next day delivery of first class mail.

The national target is for 92.5 per cent of letters to reach their destination anywhere in the UK the next day. No individual postcode area, of which there are 122 in the country, should fall below 90 per cent.

Swindon joined the postcode areas of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, Southampton, Salisbury, Taunton, and Torquay in falling below the 92.5 per cent target.

95.9 per cent of first class local mail, posted and delivered within the same postcode area in Swindon, arrived the next day.

To make our test as fair as possible, each envelope was hand-written and affixed with a first class stamp.

All 30 were placed in the post box on Victoria Road at exactly noon on Tuesday, June 3. All had complete addresses although a number did have incomplete postcodes.

It currently costs 28p for a first class stamp for a letter weighing up to 60g. The price of first class postage was increased on May 8 by 1p, the first price increase for the basic first class stamp since April 2000.

The Royal Mail recommends that items which have further to travel should be posted early in the morning, making them more likely to be delivered the next working day.

Adrian Booth, a regional spokesman for Royal Mail, said: "The test carried out by the newspaper reflects that nearly all first class mail is delivered by the next day. It also shows that we had no idea it was taking place."

"There is a tremendous effort undertaken to get mail across the country for the next day, even to some of the more remote places.

"We could never promise 100 per cent of the mail being delivered simply because of weather and road conditions, but we are not being complacent and we are continuing to work hard to ensure that as much first class mail reaches the customer the next day.

"Many customers don't realise the efforts being made behind the scenes. Last year following the problems on the railways, we had to bring in emergency systems to keep the mail moving.

"At one point trains would stop before reaching line closures. The mail would then be transferred onto road-going vehicles to be transferred to another train on a different line in order to avoid delays of two or three hours.

"Sometimes mail from the West Country to East Anglia is flown rather than driven in order to avoid the traffic on the M25 and in London."

Gary Hepburn, regional secretary for Postwatch in the south and west of England, said that although the newspaper's experiment worked well it was on a too small a scale to prove anything conclusively.

www.postwatch.co.uk

www.royalmail.com