Melanie Onn has accused Royal Mail of staging a sorting office visit in Grimsby after she went there on 1 May and later said staff were asked to move letters and parcels out of sight before she arrived.
The Labour MP said the visit came after late delivery notifications from Royal Mail affected postcodes in her constituency, and that what she saw first looked "incredibly well" organised. But she later said the picture changed once she had spoken to workers, adding that employees had been asked to remove all letters and parcels from the depot to their vans and to bring them back after she had gone.
Royal Mail flatly rejected the allegation. "These claims are simply not true," the company said, adding that it invites MPs into delivery offices "to give them an honest view of local operations". It also said the Grimsby visit took place in the afternoon, when mail was already out for delivery, and that delivery offices are naturally quieter at that point in the day, which is not evidence that mail has been removed or hidden.
Onn said the visit was "relatively quiet" because the posties were out on deliveries, and that the management team told her they were aiming to make sure all of their post was out on time. She said she and her team spoke with five separate postal workers from the Grimsby depot while campaigning for May's local elections, and that those conversations added to her concern about what had been presented during the visit. She described the episode as "corporate whitewash" and said, "I've stopped them randomly on the street, so they haven't conferred. They haven't been prepped in any way, shape or form," before adding that some of the post had been removed from the frames and some had been sent out of the building, but then reappeared.
The row lands in the middle of wider complaints about late delivery notifications in Grimsby, where residents and local representatives have already been pressing Royal Mail on service levels. It also echoes other claims made by MPs in different parts of the country, including Portsmouth North MP Amanda Martin, who wrote to the chair of the Business and Trade Select Committee in March after hearing stories that workers were told to conceal cluttered letters during a visit. Wrexham MP Andrew Ranger said he visited Wrexham delivery office at Christmas and later learned that Royal Mail management allegedly decided to hide post in advance of his visit, while Wrexham councillor Marc Jones raised the allegation again in April.
For Royal Mail, the immediate test is not whether it can dismiss the accusation in public, but whether it can persuade MPs that visits are showing the real state of its delivery offices. Onn says the Grimsby stop did not do that. Royal Mail says it did. The dispute now sits on the record, and so do the broader questions about how often late deliveries are being masked by appearances rather than fixed in practice.
