Your Witney
Get involved: send your photos, videos, news & views by texting 'WITNEY NEWS' to 80360 or email »
Postal sorting to move to Swindon
7:09pm Friday 16th May 2008
MORE than 400 Royal Mail workers today received final confirmation the Oxford Mail Centre would close as the company shifts its sorting operation to Swindon.
About 430 staff at the office in Cowley were briefed by senior Royal Mail managers about the closure, more than seven months after Royal Mail signalled its intention to move to a £20m facility in Swindon.
Building work at the new site is expected to be completed this summer with the full transfer of operations from Oxford to be completed by summer 2009.
The announcement ends any hopes the workers had of saving the centre and means from now on mail posted to addresses within Oxfordshire will be sorted in Wiltshire.
However, Royal Mail denied the switch would lead to a second-class postal service for Oxford. Royal Mail spokesman Richard Hall said: "Delivery and collection operations across the Swindon and Oxford postcode areas will not be affected as a result of this change."
"We believe moving work from Oxford to our extended facility in Swindon, which will be equipped with the latest technologies, will enable us to address an urgent need to improve the reliability of the mail services for our customers in the OX postcode area."
Your sayYourOxford
Add your comment
Register for a FREE Witney Gazette account and you can have your say on today's news and sport by adding comments on articles we publish. The best comments may even get published in the paper.
Please register now or sign in below to continue.
In this section
Sponsored Links
Local Advertisers
Local Information
Enter your postcode, town or place name
How Funny, says...
9:51pm Fri 16 May 08
So where they all going to ruin next, BMW won't have them back, my bet is they're all going to become bus drivers, so within six months public transport in Oxford will cease to function as drivers go on strike because an inspector asked one of their members to finish his tea and get on his bus which was already ten minutes late.
Thankfully after six months intensive counselling the union member is now just about able to drink a cup of tea again and is hopeful of returning to work within the next decade.