Postal delivery changes planned for Hyndburn (From Blackburn Citizen)

Postal delivery changes planned for Hyndburn

9:00pm Saturday 16th February 2013 in News

EVERY household, business and organisation in Hyndburn will receive letters in the coming weeks warning of changes to their postal deliveries.

The times they receive their letters and parcels are set the change and daily alterations to delivery times are on the cards.

Royal Mail will write to all 29,500 addresses in the BB5 postcode which covers Accrington. Oswaldtwistle, Church, Rishton, Baxenden and surrounding towns and villages alerting customers to changes to the way it delivers post over the next few weeks.

Postmen and women will use new methods and adopt revised routes as these changes are introduced on a staged basis.

There will be no job losses among the 80 staff in the borough service.

Hyndburn MP Graham Jones said that while the changes were unfortunate, they were inevitable.

A Royal Mail spokeswoman said there would be no alteration to the daily delivery to all urban addresses by 3 pm and rural ones by 4 pm six days a week.

She said that some normal delivery times to individual addresses would change to earlier or later and they could be altered on a daily basis to cope with unusual volumes or types of mail Postmen will also be issued with new larger trolleys, sometimes work in pairs rather than individually and make greater use of small vans instead of traditional mail bags The changes have been introduced because fewer letters are posted due to email, mobile phones, social networking, and texting and more and larger parcels being mailed thanks to on-line shopping.

The spokeswoman said: “We deliver an increasing number of larger items and so we are investing in new equipment to carry these items to customers even more securely.

“The new equipment also reduces the risk of injury to our postmen and women from carrying heavier mail bags.”

Royal Mail Manager,Darren Banks, said: “The changes to delivery routes will mean that a member of our local and experienced team will still be delivering to our customers in Accrington.”

Mr Jones said:”It’s not exactly what we might want but the way we used the post has changed. As long as the staff, unions and management can come to an agreement on the new working practices, there are no redundancies and local people get their post every day, we have to accept changes.”