Will you help us put the postal service to the test? This morning the Communication Workers Union said it planned to call 120,000 members out on strike next Thursday unless a last-minute deal could be reached with Royal Mail management. That will be a nationwide strike, but up and down the country postal services are already suffering.
We would like to find out if your post has already been hit by strike action. Last month we sent out letters to 20 addresses over the course of a week, and found that the mail that had furthest to go was arriving first. In fact, some of the letters we sent to homes in London still haven't arrived. The Royal Mail has a target to deliver 93% of first-class mail the next day – our snapshot put the figure at 84%.
The strike action so far seems to have affected London most, and Royal Mail says the majority of other regions are operating as normal. We would like to find out if that is the case by broadening our experiment to test more addresses around the UK. We need 500 readers who would be willing to receive a postcard from us and let us know what day it arrived. To take part, please email your full postal address to: postalstrike.guardian@googlemail.com.
We plan to send the letters early next week, so you will need to be around to let us know when they pop through your letterbox. Unfortunately, due to current events, we can't say whether this will be next week or in several weeks' time …
