A series of employers, including transport authorities, have reportedly banned workers from ordering personal parcels to be delivered to the workplace, months after TfL warned that an increase in unregulated traffic was largely down to a rise in office deliveries.
The DVSA and DfT are among those said to have imposed the ban because post rooms have begun to struggle with the volume of parcels arriving every day.
Over the past few years the rapid growth of the online retail sector has boosted the revenue of parcel delivery firms; Yodel’s executive chairman Dick Stead has repeatedly warned that said companies need to do more, still, to keep up with demand around peak periods.
But simultaneously, shoppers switching to online platforms have grown wary of missing the postman and had parcels delivered to them at work.
The volumes of personal parcel deliveries to corporate buildings are unknown as yet, although one Canary Wharf worker believes as much as a third of the post sorted in the area’s iconic tower could be personal.
Commenting on the opening of a new Doddle store in Canary Wharf, Matt Maer, Canary Wharf Group’s director of group security said: “One Canada Square alone receives 450 deliveries every 24 hours, and 11,000 parcels or letters are delivered every month for 10,000 people. We estimate about 30% of these are personal packages which adds to the cost of managing a serviceat such high volumes.”
With options such as parcel shops – Doddle included- and click and collect services readily available to online shoppers, The Hub wondered whether a spike in workplace parcel bans would have an adverse effect on the delivery sector.
Would firms have to restructure to move delivery slots much earlier or later in the day, for example, or jump on the weekend delivery bandwagon?
Frank Proud, a director at analyst firm Apex Insight, said while enterprises such as parcel shop's haven't taken off in the UK as quickly as in Europe (the firm has a newly published report on the subject), the trend could well be harmful to the parcel delivery sector if it increased, for a number of reasons.
Proud told The Hub: “Nobody knows what volume of parcels go to the workplace at the moment. But if that number went down, you’d get more failed deliveries, which would be bad for the parcels companies.
"You’d also get more home deliveries, which is more costly, because it’s more expensive to deliver one parcel to this house and another parcel to that house, than it is to deliver thirty to Canary Wharf tower.
"You might find that, possibly worse, it might drive people towards click and collect which would push business out of the parcel sector altogether and put it back into the retailers’ logistics infrastructure.”
Proud added that the workplace parcel bans are likely to increase the more it is discussed in the press, as many employers are unaware of the hidden costs of receiving and sorting their employees' personal mail.