Delivery dates again - the rolling postal strikes

When there were postal strikes in August, we considered the likely impact on deemed delivery on our Blog here. The postal strikes that are due to take place in November will only apply to certain departments within the Royal Mail, and not necessarily all on the same day. When the strike affected the whole service, it was appropriate to discount the days when you knew that there would be no delivery. Now that the strikes will affect different departments on different days, you would have to decide on a policy, record it, then justify your approach if challenged by a creditor or regulator. 

There is no clear solution, because the rules were not written with this situation in mind, but there are a few approaches you could consider:

 

• Ignore the strikes, work on normal deemed delivery dates, and leave it to creditors or others to challenge you – this is risky, but there is an argument that many creditors are too apathetic to respond.

• Make some allowance for the strikes, without trying to work out exactly which departments are working and which ones are striking – this would be a bit like allowing for overseas post. You could allow an extra working day or two, which would probably be enough in the vast majority of cases. You could even treat the particularly heavy days (e.g. 25 and 28 November) as non-counting days, like Bank Holidays or full strike days.

• Try to calculate the likely delivery on a notice-by-notice basis, deciding which strikes are likely to have an impact and how long they are likely to add to the deemed delivery date – I fear that this would be pretty complicated and might get you close to some of the statutory time limits.

• Try to contact creditors to get consent to use email instead of post, because of the strikes. You could explain the problem and ask for consent, but it would mean chasing people up for a response and even then there may be stragglers who don’t consent, so you end up having to take one of the other options anyway.

In addition to the option that you choose, you will probably have to be ready for situations where someone can show that they have had insufficient notice and challenges you before the decision is held. Even if you used a virtual meeting, you would not be able to adjourn it. If it is to be treated as invalid, adjourning it to allow more notice does not change the fact that it is invalid. Instead, you would have to withdraw the meetings (or at least in a CVL adjourn the members’ meeting and withdraw the creditors’ meeting), then reconvene them, allowing more notice. If you had to reconvene a CVL decision and delay a members’ meeting, you would almost certainly have to get a new Statement of Affairs sworn, because the delay would put it outside the time limits. If, in contrast, someone should complain after the meeting, you should be able to rely on rule 12.64, unless they can show that they have been prejudiced by the decision to go ahead, which we would argue is unlikely.