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A newspaper investigation in which volunteers sent out 177 first-class letters across its patch revealed which areas were worst-hit by late deliveries.
Highland News and Media looked into how well postal services were working across the Highlands, Moray and Aberdeenshire, prompted by local concerns about the number of letters arriving late and missed delivery days.
The publisher organised an experiment which saw 12 volunteers – based in communities all over its wide-ranging patch – send nearly 180 first class letters.
Reporter Lewis McBlane kept track of every envelope’s journey, recording exactly when each one arrived, before analysing the final data.
The findings revealed that a greater proportion of postal deliveries were late in the built-up areas – incuding Highlands capital Inverness – than in more remote rural areas such as Caithness.
In total, 41pc of the letters posted to the city of Inverness arrived late – nearly six times higher than Royal Mail’s regulator-set target.
As well as the Inverness Courier, pictured, the survey generated stories for eight of Highland News and Media’s websites, from the John O’Groat Journal in the north to the Strathspey and Badenoch Herald in the south.
In response to the story, Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire MP Angus MacDonald commented: “This excellent piece of journalism has evidenced exactly what we have expected; the Highlands is receiving a service far worse than the Royal Mail’s own targets.”
Lewis told HTFP: “I was really pleased to get these stories published, since it was a chance to use some data journalism and visualisation techniques on data we created with the help of our local communities.
“The public have been really engaged with the articles and, while I wouldn’t say it was scientific, our experiment has started a lot of conversations across our different patches.
“Some of the findings do seem to reflect the experience of people in the north of Scotland about their postal services, but we’ve also heard a lot about how much people value their hard-working local posties.”
“After every letter had arrived, I was surprised by the fact that the least remote place involved was also the worst-performing – Inverness itself.”
