Royal Mail has announced this week it is installing ten new large parcel conveyors at its mail centres to improve efficiency and meet growing demand for parcel deliveries ahead of the peak Christmas period. The conveyors, which will speed up parcel sorting and improve their tracking, will be deployed at mail centres where large parcels are currently mostly sorted by hand. Christmas is Royal Mail’s busiest period, with around double the normal volume of parcels processed.

Since 2017, the average size of a parcel handled by Royal Mail has increased by more than 25%, and the number of large parcels (bigger than a shoebox) handled has more than doubled. Royal Mail’s in-house engineering team initially designed and built a new large parcel conveyor for the Midlands Parcel Hub, using belts instead of the typical rollers. The same design is now being rolled out across its mail centres. The original large parcel conveyors are live at Royal Mail’s Gatwick and South Midlands Mail Centres, and installations are now taking place at Jubilee and Tyneside. Ahead of Christmas, conveyors will be deployed at Medway, Birmingham, Leeds, Home Counties North and Belfast. Chelmsford, Greenford and Bristol will have theirs installed by February next year.

Neil Chaplain, Royal Mail’s Engineering and Process Design Director, said: “We are seeing an increasing number of larger sized parcels being sent through our network as online shopping habits continue to evolve. The addition of our in-house designed large parcel conveyers to some of our busiest mail centres will help us automate the handling of them as much as possible and increase efficiency, especially as we head into the peak Christmas shopping period.”