Josh Babarinde

The Royal Mail leadership is failing our hard-working posties and failing Eastbourne. Eastbournians are missing vital medical appointments because letters from doctors have arrived late. Others are being forced to reschedule legal hearings because of to delayed documents, and some are missing important deadlines for paying fines and bills. Time and again, the Royal Mail has unacceptably attempted to pile the blame on our hard-working posties by citing long-term sickness and absence as the primary cause of the failures. That is not true. The problem is a toxic culture at the top—a culture in which staff feel unable to take well-deserved annual leave, and when they do, they return to weeks of backlog and are left playing catch-up because cover is not taken seriously. This is pushing our posties to breaking point: amazing posties like Manuel, my postie, and others across town, in particular Barry, who covers King’s Drive too. I make one short and simple request of the Minister in order to support us in Eastbourne to stand up and be heard. Will he meet with me and hard-working local posties, as well as representatives of the CWU, to hear directly from those on the frontline about what is going on in Eastbourne, the challenges they face, and the upstream changes that are urgently needed to make Royal Mail great again?