Christmas mail not delayed

Press, 19 December 1981, Page 6

Christmas mail not delayed

No delay had occurred in the delivery of local Christmas mail this year, said Post Office officials yesterday. The volume of mail had been building up and post offices were fairly busy, said the Chief Postmaster, Mr N. J. Williams. The new postal centre in Hereford Street had made handling mail much easier.

The postal services manager, Mr L. Tredinninck, said that staff were sorting between 10,000 and 12,000 parcels a day. They were handling about 800 to 1000 bags of second-class mail, papers, and packets each day. “The new postal centre has enabled us to double the amount of second-class mail we can handle, and the par-cel-sorting machines have speeded up the sorting of parcels,” he said. About 250,000 letters were being posted locally each day. These still had to be handled manually, said Mr Tredinnick, but there was no backlog of local mail. Delays in delivery of mail from Australia were occurring because of strikes by postal workers in Australia. A big volume of mail was arriving from Australia and staff were five to six days behind with sorting. Local postmen had threatened an overtime ban because no Sunday work was offered to them for the Sundays before Christmas. The postmen would not work this. Sunday, said Mr Williams, but they would have overtime work on SaL urday and for three days before Christmas next week.