09 February 2010 - Steve Lawson - © Hellmail Postal News

Picture if you will, an extremely muddy and narrow farm track on a steep descent in Suffolk, and a Home Delivery Network van emerging from the blackness to deliver a package. For the owner, this is no ordinary parcel - it is is an urgently required machine part, but for driver Wayne Lawson, he is finally clearing the last of his deliveries for the day.

It is 6pm and pitch-black. This is the village of Lamarsh, three miles from Sudbury, five miles west of Halstead and so dark at this time of year, even owls carry torches. He has already driven along an extremely narrow road with few passing places, lined with trees and steep banks, but the track to the farm is ancient, in fact barely changed in hundreds of years and has probably seen more horse and carts in its lifetime than any modern vehicles. As the track narrows further,and the mud becomes deeper still, he reaches a 500 year old farm that would not be out of place in a Lovejoy episode.

The package is suprisingly heavy and he is reliant on the lights from his van as he gets out and squelches his way to the door. Once delivered and back in the cab, he has to reverse all the way back up the track, no easy feat in the dark and with his wheels spinning in the mud for much of the way.

What is perhaps more astonishing about all this is that Parcelforce will not deliver here, deeming the road too difficult to traverse and also unprepared to walk the few hundred yards to the farmhouse either. This situation is familiar for increasingly more rural-dwellers as health & safety rules extend to tracks and off-road routes that once saw regular deliveries for perhaps hundreds of years - indeed they were reliant on such services. Now remote routes such as this can be deemed unfit with a sweep of the pen, leaving some customers to have to drive (in some cases) several miles to collect their package from a post office. However with many post offices now either closed or only available a few days a week, the drive can be quite extensive and leaving a real question mark over the future of parcel deliveries that at one time were taken for granted. For those that work office hours, trying to make the post office before it closes is often impractical.

Sadly, this situation does not bode well for Parcelforce (part of the Royal Mail Group) when you consider that its rivals aim to deliver wherever an item needs to go. The Home Delivery Network Limited (HDN) is the UK's largest home delivery and collection service and has recently reached an agreement with Deutsche Post DHL to acquire its UK domestic business-to-business and business-to-consumer parcel delivery operations - DHL Domestic. The combined businesses will deliver more than 180 million parcels a year and have annual sales of more than £600m.

Over the last twelve months, HDN launched a series of new delivery services following its £30m IT investment - all designed to allow retailers to offer consumers wide-ranging delivery services. These include SMS updates on deliveries, timed services (including "avoid-the-school-run": 09.30-14.30), Saturday and evening deliveries. In 2010, the company is launching even more new services that make it ever more convenient for consumers to receive deliveries to their homes.

Locals here say that its not unusual for parcels sent via Parcelforce to be sent back to the sender with no attempted delivery at all. One farmer I asked merely sighed when I mentioned Parcelforce and said:

"We simply won't get it if it comes through them. Yes the roads can sometimes be difficult in Winter but most of the time they won't even try on these tiny roads." he said.

One customer who lives in a cottage just across the field, told me she ordered some homeopathic remedies from the States which took a couple of days to reach the UK but a further two weeks before she received them and even then she had to drive six miles to collect the package.

Clearly HDN are making their presence known amongst rural home owners and in many cases, the price to send the item can actually be less than that charged by Parcelforce - and with a guaranteed delivery. The concern now is that as the Royal Mail loses further market share and looks to shave more from its operational costs, only the most viable routes will see guaranteed deliveries.

Post is a different matter. The local postman has developed his own system to ensure everyone gets their post, regardless of the snow and ice, and providing he can at least get part of the way, he'll give the occupier three short rings to let them know that he has left the post at a pre-agreed location - often the hollow of a tree or close to a fence. Needless to say he is not only valued, he is a key member of the community.

The hamlet of Booze in North Yorkshire, saw delivery services withdrawn altogether in 2008 after a CWU health and safety official declared the access road too dangerous without the use of a 4x4 vehicle and the service was cancelled forthwith. It was only finally reinstated after the creation of three vehicle passing places and strategically placed mirrors erected along the route to cover blind spots. The reality for many though, is that their routes will remain off limits indefinately. As one landowner pointed out:

"The land moves. When it rains, soil will actually shift from the top of the valley to the bottom and this can create muddy tracks during certain times of the year. However, we're a community and we have no problem in getting a landrover to tow a driver out in bad weather. We've always done it. Maintaining a road on a shifting landscape is an impossibility 24 hours a day. Really, they should be using the correct vehicles to do the job - not drop us completely because their vehicles are not equipped for this kind of terrain."

One retailer told me that particular items in his range of stock always "vanished" if sent by Parcelforce and he now uses a private courier for those particular items. He was unable to give any suggestion as to why this was happening but said that he had lost so many it was no longer viable to send them other than via an independent courier.

The machine part arrived as promised. A joint effort by both Parcel2go and the Home Delivery Network. The postcode here isn't on every database apparently but I was not only able to get an immediate response from Parcel2Go via their web site chat feature (that was impressive), they emailed HDN straight away and Wayne delivered the part the next day without a hitch (literal or otherwise). Given the rapid response by both Parcel2go and HDN, and being able to deliver right to the door, one has to ask if Parcelforce runs the risk of seeing even more busiuness go to rivals if it simply cannot or won't deliver - for whatever reason.

Parcel2Go, which handled the initial sender's enquiry, was founded in 2000 by Fil Adams-Mercer following the successful sale of a video rental business to Blockbuster. The business was borne out of a magazine distribution interest which operated out of a stairwell of one of the video stores in Bolton. The company developed an online presence during the first dot.com boom and has since steadily grown to be one of the UK's leading parcel delivery services.

The company has over 600,000 users and sends 750,000 parcels each year. Parcel2Go.com's relationship with leading courier services such Home Delivery Network provides customers with a cheaper and more flexible service.

The company now operates with revenue close to £11 million managed by Fil and his son, Richard Adams-Mercer who launched the company when he was still only 19.

Certainly in this instance (and it genuinely pains me to say it), Parcelforce were put to shame and it should not be this way. With HDN pledging to ensure that every customer’s experience is a positive one and Parcel2Go clearly customer-focused and competitively priced, perhaps it is time that Parcelforce reassesed its connection with its customers and made equally large strides in reinforcing confidence in its service for some of the least accessible places in the British Isles - by ensuring health and safety alone does not see services dry up completely and its reputation evaporate with it - as here.

Where theres a will, theres a way and with the efforts of Parcel2Go and HDN's Wayne Lawson - word soon spreads.

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