Royal Mail insist postal vote delays aren’t their fault after criticism

Royal Mail has rejected suggestions they are blame for postal vote delays and insists there is ‘no backlog’ ahead of the General Election.

Postal Affairs minister Kevin Hollinrake is said to be ‘urgently’ investigating the issue with people struggling to get ballot packs in time for Thursday’s vote.

He made a suggestion Royal Mail should have anticipated the extra demands for postal because of the summer holidays, with Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney suggesting voters could be ‘disenfranchised’ because of the delays.

It’s been a particular issue in Scotland with the school holidays starting last week and many families are already abroad.

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The Royal Mail say they aren’t to blame though, with a spokesperson for the service said: “We have no backlog of postal votes and, whilst we are not complacent, we remain confident that postal votes handed to us on time will be delivered prior to polling day.

“Where specific concerns have been raised, we have investigated and confirmed ballot packs are being delivered as soon as they arrive in our network.

“We would welcome a review into the timetable for future elections with all stakeholders to ensure that the system for printing and administering postal votes before they are handed to Royal Mail works as smoothly as possible.”

Appearing on Tuesday’s morning broadcast round, health minister Maria Caulfield had said that Mr Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, was “in direct contact” with Royal Mail over the problem.

“Kevin is investigating this urgently,” she said. “I know there’s extra resources going into this to try and do a sweep of all the sorting offices and make sure they’re out there.”

It comes after Mr Hollinrake told the Telegraph that he did not think there was any issue at play “other than Royal Mail being competent and fulfilling their obligations under the USO (Universal Service Obligation)”.

“There’s a resourcing issue. They have recruited extra people and I welcome that but they’ve got to make sure they’ve got the right number of people to deliver the mail at busy times like this,” he told the paper.

“It’s not acceptable it’s sat in sorting offices. It needs to be delivered to people’s houses. So they need to put more people on to do that.”