Dispatches: Post Office Undercover, Monday 8pm, C4

Posted by Stewart Turner

Dispatches: Post Office Undercover © Channel 4

After a few months out of the limelight courtesy of their brothers and sisters over at British Airways, it was the turn of that other British business behemoth to be thrust back into the public consciousness last night. Some six years after they exposed the full horrors of your average Royal Mail sorting office, the Dispatches team returned to see if things have improved.

The answer was a predictably resounding ‘No’. It’s still a place where greetings cards are routinely torn open in the hope of snaffling some birthday money; and the back office is still a throwback to the bad old days of industrial strife, where workers will stage a wildcat strike if the management so much as propose changing the brand of teabags in the staff canteen.

A couple of undercover reporters posed as casual workers to dig the dirt, and did a sterling job, never once taking delivery of a fist in the face despite giving every member of staff a Paxmanesque grilling. They witnessed parcels frequently left under rose bushes and in the rain to enable posties to do their rounds quicker; rounds abandoned due to the merest smatterings of snow, and almighty backlogs of mail in the sorting offices as a result of an unofficial “go slow”.

But it wasn’t all one way traffic. The investigation also found that staff routinely have to do their rounds with substandard equipment, doing a job which is changing beyond recognition with the boom of online retailing and the back-breaking parcels and packages this entails. There was also some bizarrely localised bargaining on display, with one sorting office changing the working week from four days to five days and back again within the space of a week.

The overriding feeling is that Royal Mail needs someone to grab it by the balls and get it working as a unit. Local management having the power to switch shift patterns in such a slapdash fashion is frankly ludicrous, and despite the usual rogues’ gallery of bad apples, one feels that the posties’ concerns are grounded in at least some form of reality.

All in all, it was compelling viewing for anyone who’s ever been left in tears when Aunt Flossie’s birthday card turns up two weeks late with size 10 footprints all over it. Let’s hope Dispatches won’t have to head back again in 2015.

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