Size matters but Royal Mail ‘gets it wrong’

A small business owner has accused Royal Mail of consistently applying erroneous charges to items sent through its network and not taking his queries seriously when he complained.

Stuart Kirkwood, who owns Rye-based Zest Clothing with his wife, Melinda, said his problems began in July 2021, when he started to see “oversize” surcharges on Royal Mail invoices.

Zest Clothing sells a range of products online but its most popular items are smaller accessories such as socks and hats, as well as women’s underwear, which are often sent as “large letters” through the Royal Mail postal service. Zest’s products are vacuum-packed before they are parcelled up to ensure they fit through customers’ letterboxes, which helps keep delivery costs low.

Kirkwood says that when he receives an invoice with additional charges, it does not list which items are being surcharged. To work out which packages they are attributed to, he has to log in to the Royal Mail system to download a file which contains a spreadsheet listing the mail items.

“It shows those which were oversize and sometimes shows the size measured by Royal Mail. In some cases there is a size listed which shows the item was within the ‘large letter’ maximum size, yet they have still surcharged us,” said Kirkwood, 58.

In other cases, he has reviewed CCTV footage, which covers the table at Zest’s warehouse where orders are packed, in order to provide the evidence needed to contest an additional charge.

Kirkwood said that when he tries to contest the charges he is met with resistance from Royal Mail. “They say: ‘We’ve investigated it; it is right’. So they’re immediately trying to fob you off. And for a lot of people, there’s nothing else they can do. They won’t have any evidence to go back with to refute it.

“To give you one example from October, we sent a large letter item at a cost of £3.09. We received an oversize surcharge of £2.43. On the Royal Mail report listing the surcharged items it said the size was 255 x 240 x 22mm which is within the large letter size limit. When I queried this they said the size was 530 x 370 x 26mm,” said Kirkwood.

This would make the package — which contained one three-pack of tights for baby girls aged 18-24 months — more than half a metre in length.

A Royal Mail spokeswoman suggested that the “non-rigid packaging” used by Mr Kirkwood could be to blame for packages measuring beyond the allowed dimensions when they were checked by the automated system. “We would advise that customers who use non-rigid packaging take steps to ensure items retain their shape after posting to avoid any… issues,” she said.

The spokeswoman added that the organisation’s “pricing in proportion” structure was introduced in 2013 and that automation to check the dimensions of packages has been operating “for the last decade”. She said: “Our checks are performed alongside manual sampling to ensure that we are fairly paid for the items we handle.”

Kirkwood, who employs three members of staff, says he has wasted “days and days” corresponding with representatives of Royal Mail’s customer services team. “It is stressful and frustrating because of the injustice of it all. They’re big, we’re small and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s just bullying and they could be doing this to tens of thousands of small businesses.”

Since Kirkwood contacted The Times with his complaint, Royal Mail has agreed to “manually check his items” and has “refunded the correction charges as a goodwill gesture”.

Kirkwood has said that he is “pleased Royal Mail’s investigation has confirmed that the tracked surcharges we received were wrong” and that he hopes “there won’t be future surcharges with wildly wrong measurements”.

The Royal Mail spokeswoman said the company is “confident that we have sufficient systems and checks in place to ensure that customers’ items are handled fairly”.