Coronavirus Virus

Important Information From Our Key Partners!

Royal Mail Deliveries

Delivering for the country

At Royal Mail, we are actively monitoring the rapidly evolving coronavirus situation. The postal service is a key part of the UK’s infrastructure. The delivery of parcels and letters is an important way of keeping the country together and helping many people who may not have the option to leave their homes.

We will continue providing the best delivery service for you and protect the health of our people, and our customers. We have provided guidance to our people to help prevent the spread of any infection. We are doing so in line with preventative guidance from Public Health Authority. We have also made a series of adjustments to our parcel handling procedures. We are keeping our ways of working under continuous review.

Public Health England (PHE) has advised that people receiving parcels are not at risk of contracting the coronavirus. From experience with other coronaviruses, we know that these types of viruses don’t survive long on objects, such as letters or parcels. This complements the highly publicised guidance from PHE for people to wash their hands more often than usual using soap and hot water.

International delivery

We are working with our airline and postal/courier partners across the globe to maintain services.

Royal Mail’s international services to the USA remain operational. We continue to accept and process mail. For country by country updates, visit our International Incidents Bulletin.

Contingency plans

We have strong contingency plans in place to ensure mail is kept moving. The scale, vast network and business continuity expertise of our organisation means we have extensive experience in being able to quickly deploy plans so we continue to provide customers with access to our collection and delivery services, and their mail.

Whistl Deliveries

Service Update from Whistl:

We would like to update you on what Whistl is doing to continue to deliver our services to support you, at the same time ensuring the health and safety of our team and you our customers.

All of our depots around the country are open and we have appropriate resources in place to process your mail, doordrop campaigns and parcels. We are continuing to provide the full professional support you expect and we are making every effort to push your items through our network and into our Tracked carrier partners and Royal Mail, as quickly as possible. At this time there is only some risk to our normal service levels and we will keep you updated if this changes.

Handover and Delivery status

Handover

We do not envisage any issues with handover to our Tracked Domestic and International carrier partners at the current time.

Currently we have successfully been able to handover untracked and part tracked mail to all of the 36 Royal Mail Inward Mail Centres (IMC’s) to date.

Delivery

Domestic Carriers are not experiencing any delays in delivering parcels within the UK.

International Carriers are currently experiencing delays due to a number of countries cancelling flights, shutting borders or going into lockdown. This means that almost all international mail and parcels will be delayed. Please click here for a detailed update on mail and goods shipped from the UK to EU and ROW destinations.

Collections

Currently, there has been some delay to our collections. Should any of your collections become impacted, your Internal Account Executive in customer services will advise you and advise our alternative solution.

Our Customer Service team will continue to work with you to re-arrange or adjust your collection requirements should your business need to make the necessary changes to production. As things change, it is important that you keep your Internal Account Executive updated with your collection and consumable requirements.

Preparation

In preparation for continued changes, we have taken the following actions to mitigate any impact on our customers. They include:

• Provision of additional resource to cover processing, collections and handover.
• Working closely with Royal Mail and to help facilitate and achieve 100% handover at IMC’s.
• Working with our parcel carrier partners to provide alternative solutions if necessary to reduced impact on delivery.
• Putting in place a contingency plan for additional/alternative consumables to be supplied to customers.

We will continue to keep you updated and work with you to deliver solutions to ensure continuity of service.