People in Milton Keynes area say postal service is failing them

People in north Buckinghamshire have said the postal service where they live is “abominable and absolutely appalling”.

The BBC spoke to residents of Woburn Sands, Stoke Hammond and Bletchley who have complained of waiting weeks for deliveries and then getting more than 10 items of post in one go.

The Mayor of Woburn Sands, Conservative councillor David Hopkins, called it a “really series issue” and said “the service in Milton Keynes is broken”.

A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “Severe weather conditions and resourcing challenges have had an impact on deliveries to some addresses in Milton Keynes in the last two weeks.”

Woburn Sands is on the Buckinghamshire/Bedfordshire border, but is part of the Milton Keynes urban area and less than three miles from a Royal Mail delivery office at Brinklow.

Bob Carson has been living in the town since 2019 and described the service as “awful… one piece of post arrived yesterday [14 January] that was sent on 19 December about an AGM that happened last week” — so he missed the meeting.

Hopkins said he would be asking the leader of Milton Keynes City Council to write to the Royal Mail.

“People are concerned and they are not getting post often for a week, maybe two weeks, and then get 12, 15, 20 pieces of post in one go,” he said.

He said this “was not a joke anymore as it was over Christmas with cards and was becoming a really serious issue”.

Six miles away in Stoke Hammond, between Milton Keynes and Leighton Buzzard, some people said they had not received post since December.

Terry Turner runs a business, but told the BBC he had to personally deliver tax returns to clients’ houses so they were not late in paying tax, which is often due in January.

Turner said that on a more personal level he had been “waiting for my bowel screening test to come through and it is long overdue and worrying”.

His wife Hazel said the service was “abominable now and absolutely appalling”.

“We have not had the same post person for a long time since Rory left,” she said.

She said “he used to come every day” but had been replaced “by post people that do not know the area”.

“I watch them sometimes and think to myself ‘you are posting stuff into the wrong boxes along the road’,” she added.

Meanwhile in Bletchley, which has a reputation for cracking codes, some residents are finding the postal services to be an enigma.

Teresa Evans described it as “extremely poor” but said it had been like that “for a good five, six months, maybe a little longer”.

She said she had missed out on hospital appointments and as a result had written to the Chief Executive of the Royal Mail to complain and when she did “the very next day had 10 items of mail, but there were still some missing”.

She added she would only trust the post at the moment if it was a tracked service and she “had birthday cards returned to me over the last year” that had not been delivered.

The Whitehouse and Fairfields developments are rapidly expanding on the west of Milton Keynes, but Labour MP Chris Curtis said “too many residents are still not getting the post they are expecting”.

“While there have been some improvements since we started campaigning [last June], the problems are not yet fixed,” he said.

A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “We apologise for any inconvenience caused, and our posties are going above and beyond to ensure deliveries return to normal as quickly as possible.”