Inside Beeston sorting office on Royal Mail’s busiest day of the year
Video: See how Nottingham staff deal with the Royal Mail rush
Around three million items are being sorted at a Nottingham depot on Royal Mail’s busiest day of the year.
The Beeston delivery centre has taken on extra staff to cope with the demand and uses letter sorting machines which can sort 25,000 items an hour.
Around mid-December is usually the annual peak for the service, which nationally still delivers around 13 billion items a year despite fierce competition from other providers.
Paul Whitehouse, processing manager at the centre on Padge Road, said: “We’ve been planning for Christmas since earlier on in the year and started a very long time ago.
“We’ve opened nine parcel sort centres across the country to handle the additional volume and recruited an additonal 280 temporary employees to handle the Christmas post because we know it is sensitive and how important it is to our customers.”
Supervisor Adrian Redfern said: “You’re dealing with customers’ cards and in some of those cards there’s presents, so it’s your responsibility to make sure that people get that. You don’t want that child or person to be disappointed on Christmas morning.
“This is why we make sure that when we’re sorting, we sort everything correctly.”
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