No post in more than 60 areas of the West Midlands - this is what is happening at Royal Mail

But is it really all down to the weather? We have had a few days of snow, certainly, but nothing on the scale of the infamous winters of 1947, 1963, 1982 or even 2010 and 2011, when the post still managed to get through.

Mike Wood, MP for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire, is far from convinced.

"They're partly putting it down to Storm Goretti," he says. "That will have caused a few problems, but the problems have been going on for a long time, although they have certainly been getting worse over the past six months."

When Shaun Davies, MP for Telford, recently raised the matter in the House of Commons, he reported an anecdote which has become increasingly familiar in recent weeks.

"Posties have contacted me privately to tell me that they have been ordered not to deliver post and to prioritise parcels,"he told fellow MPs this week. Sir Alan Campbell, leader of the House of Commons, replied that he had heard exactly the same rumour this week. These rumours are rife on the streets of the West Midlands. A man from Dudley, who asked not to be named, said his own postman had said he was under instruction to prioritise parcel deliveries over letters. 

"He told me that some of the letters he was delivering had been sat on for three weeks," he said.

In October last year, Royal Mail was fined £21 million by regulator Ofcom for failing to meet its targets for first and second class mail. It was the third consecutive year the operator had been fined for its poor performance, and in the past week, both Mr Davies and Mark Pritchard, his neighbouring MP for The Wrekin, have lodged separate complaints with Ofcom.

So what is going wrong with the service?

A Royal Mail spokeswoman, who declined to be named, denied that postal workers were being instructed to cut back on delivering letters, and to instead focus on the more lucrative parcel side of the business.

"Ofcom has looked into this claim previously and found no evidence that Royal Mail instructs the prioritisation of parcels over letters outside of these recognised contingency plans," she says.

"It’s important to understand that during exceptionally busy periods, delivery offices can become very busy. Parcels take up far more space than letters, and in large numbers they can block walkways and create health and safety risks. In those moments, clearing parcels first is sometimes necessary to keep offices safe and to ensure all mail, including letters, continues to move through the network."

Mr Wood, who represented the Dudley South seat before boundary changes, has compiled a diary of the problems raised by 22 separate constituents over the past three years.

"I'm seriously concerned that people in Kingswinford have not been receiving letters on time via Royal Mail, with post sometimes taking up to two weeks to arrive," he says.

"I have also raised similar issues of poor service in Pattingham, Kingswood and Wombourne. This is a longstanding and repeating issue, and although things initially did seem to be improving early last year, complaints about the service have increased once again over the past six months."

Mr Wood cites and example of a woman being pressured by her energy supplier after failing to pay a bill she had not received, a neighbour had exactly the same experience," he says. Another resident complained that a letter from Russells Hall Hospital took 12 days to arrive. In July last year, a constituent reported going two months without any mail, despite having been sent letters by first-class post in May and June. The same month two constituents complained of missing a hospital appointments, the one receiving not post for five days, the other for two weeks.

"Neighbours went to the sorting office to complain, but were dismissed  on staffing grounds," he says.

On another occasion, a constituent received no mail for three weeks, before it all arrived bundled together.

"I've written to the directors of Royal Mail multiple times regarding the Kingswinford sorting office, but the service just isn't improving," says Mr Wood.

"I am yet to receive a response that addresses the problem in full."

As well as lodging a complaint with Ofcom, Mr Pritchard also met with senior managers at Royal Mail earlier this month. He said the volume of complaints he was receiving from constituents was causing him great concern.

"There have been missed hospital appointments, there have been people waiting anxiously for the results of medical tests, some of them cancer sufferers, and there have been other people that have been impacted by not receiving financial documents and also legal documents," he says. "This really is having an impact in people's lives. I am particularly concerned around those that are waiting for correspondence from either hospitals or GPs or other medical documentation and information."

Pensioner Michael Thickett, of Penn, Wolverhampton, subscribes to the Radio Times and has it sent to his home. But the 79-year-old has been getting them a fortnight late - which means they come after the programmes have been aired.

He says: "It is incredibly frustrating. Two came on the same day - one was a fortnight late and the other a week late.

"I pay a lot of money for the subscription and they are sent first class. The Royal Mail tells us that first class post should arrive the day after it is posted, but the service has turned into a complete shambles."

Concerned that she had received no mail for 12 days, Jane Jones from Newport went to the town's delivery office to ask if there was a problem. She was handed a bundle of undelivered letters, including the details of a hospital appointment.

Lesley Jones, from Sedgley, received 14 letters on Wednesday (January 21).

"One was dated December 29, and a hospital appointment for January 8," she says. "Disgraceful."

Leah Williams, from Halesowen, says her water bill took five weeks to arrive, meaning that she was overdue with her payment, and had to settle the bill in full because she was not eligible for monthly payments.

"Royal Mail, as a company, left me in a bit of a tight stretch, as I'm sure is the case with a lot of people when receiving bills in the post," she says.

Joanne Tallis of Brierley Hill received 15 letters on Thursday (January 22), including one from the hospital dated December 5.

"Something has gone very wrong with Royal Mail," she says.

Royal Mail was bought by Czech businessman Daniel Kretinsky's EP Group for £3.6 billion in December 2024, the first time the 508-year-old postal service came under foreign ownership .The deal was backed by unions, who hoped it would bring stability to the company after a period of turbulence.

In July last year, Ofcom agreed to relax some of the rules laid down in its Universal Service Obligation, after the company argued that the requirements were no longer sustainable in the long term.  Most affected was the second-class service, which shifted from a Monday to Saturday to service, to one with deliveries just three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Delivery targets were also relaxed, with the required number of letters delivered the next day cut from 93 per cent to 90 per cent. For second-class, the targeted level of post delivered within three days was reduced from 98.5 per cent to 95 per cent, although a new requirement was added that 99 per cent of all mail must arrive no more than two days late.

However, the Communication Workers Union has not agreed to the terms of that deal, which Wolverhampton assistant branch secretary Mark Ward says is another factor in the problem.

Recruitment is also a major problem, says the union's regional secretary for the Midlands, Mark Harper. He says a major bone of contention is that new recruits to the postal service are being offered a lower starting rate than existing staff.

"It's caused major problems," he says. "You get people who will start on a Monday, and by Thursday or Friday they have left.

"They are being paid about the minimum wage, and they see that people working for Aldi or Lidl are getting paid more, and getting a lot less cold and wet.

"Royal Mail are really struggling to retain staff, they spend a lot of money training them, and putting them in uniforms, and then after a few days they say 'no thanks, it's not for me'."

Stourbridge MP Cat Eccles has raised the matter with Blair McDougall, the minister responsible for postal services. She said he was gathering all the information from MPs across the country before deciding on how to respond.

She stresses that the changes were down to the internal processes of the company, nationally, not local sorting and delivery offices.

"I just feel for the posties," she says. "They are beside themselves, they just want to deliver a good service

"Our local postal staff work incredibly hard and pride themselves on providing a good service," she says.

"The public aren't getting the service they are paying for.

"The first-class service isn't first-class any more, and second class is also pretty terrible."