Has the whole world gone mad or am I just getting old? All mail for Newcastle BDC now goes to a Royal Mail sorting office in Gateshead where it is opened then forwarded to the BDC. Not sure if Royal Mail sort it by DWP section. If so what training have they had to identify the appropriate sections? If not, what's the point. All mail for Bootle DBC now goes to Preston where it is opened. Is this also Royal Mail? Is this repeated all round the country? The potential for losing enclosures by people who have no liability to sort out the consequences is a concern, as is confidentiality. Any experiences?

We've been told that all post for Bootle DBC should be sent to a PO Box in Chester.

Yes it is happening generally. Not quite as bad as it looks though. The physical process of moving mail is unchanged because all mail already goes through the Mail Centres - eg letters for Bootle DBC already go through Chester Mail Centre, Newcastle mail goes through Gateshead etc. And my understanding is that mail opening does not actually take place at the Mail Centre but is done by a separate contractor at an undisclosed location. Presumably the new addresses are to help this process. Very confusing though.

Richard Atkinson

I've also noticed that correspondence to the Tribunals Service in Nottingham is going to a Royal Mail opening centre. I'm not sure whether that explains why a recent appeal submission with clearly numbered and lettered documents "bounced back" to me in random order.

Frankly, I don't think the DWP is going far enough with its current strategy of virtual offices that are not really where they seem to be.

Only recently, in our office, we easily tracked down the contact number for the Crisis Loans department, despite several attempts to evade detection including phone number changes.

No, it's time the DWP got its act together and opened up a string of virtual offices in a real virtual world such as Secondlife:

http://www.nrdc.org/onearth

No one's fooled anymore by their spurious postal addresses which can eventually be found by the punters in the real world. By having virtual offices paying out virtual benefits, the annual social security bill could be slashed by £100 billion at a stroke. Then everyone would be virtually happy ever after, or is that just Alice in Wonderland stuff?