UK Post Office to charge for pre-9am delivery

The Post Office has announced that it plans to charge 14 stg per week for customers who wish to receive their mail before 9.00 am, according to a report on the BBC 6.00 pm news.

The Post Office will be carrying out a pilot scheme of the new charges for deliveries in certain areas from next week, it said.

The Post Office has already announced that it will be abolishing the second post for those customers who still receive it and, for those householders and small businesses which receive less than 20 letters per week, deliveries will then only be between 9.00 am and 12 noon.

The BBC reported that the Post Office expects to make some 350 mln stg savings from its plans to charge for those customers who request early delivery.

TELEGRAPH (UK) 11th July 2002
PAY POUNDS 14 A WEEK FOR EARLY POST

HOUSEHOLDERS and businesses will have to pay pounds 14 a week if they want post delivered before 9am, the Royal Mail announced yesterday. Only customers regularly receiving 20 or more items of mail a day will be exempt from the charge, which will be introduced on Monday as part of a pilot scheme in 14 areas. Anyone unwilling to pay the fee, which amounts to almost pounds 750 a year, will have to collect their mail from the sorting office to receive it before 9am. Normal delivery will occur before noon and the second post is to be scrapped. The Royal Mail, part of Consignia which last year lost pounds 1.1 billion, claimed that the scheme would “benefit everybody”. It said it would be able to deliver a million more items of first-class post on the following day. “Doing nothing was not an option,” said a spokesman for the company, which despite being a public liability company has just one shareholder, the Government. “We had to look at the way we work.”

However, the company expects to save about pounds 350 million a year. Sally Low, head of policy for the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “A cheque arriving in the mail before 9am or after noon can make the difference between a firm surviving or folding.” The areas included in the trial are: Crawley, West Sussex; Bow, east London; Edinburgh Dell; Sheringham, Norfolk; east Manchester; Llanelli; Newbury, Berks; Newhaven, East Sussex; Loughborough, Leicestershire, Halifax, West Yorkshire; Plymouth, Devon; Ballymena, Northern Ireland; Thirsk, North Yorkshire and St Helens, Merseyside.