As you will be aware, the King’s Coronation ceremony is taking place in the City of London on Saturday 6 May 2023.

As a result, we have been made aware that specific areas of London will be subject to road closures and vehicle restrictions from 19:00 on 5 May to after the Coronation event clear up on 6 May 2023. The annex to this letter provides a map showing the areas of London that will be subject to such closures and restrictions that we currently know of.  

The reason we wanted to write to you about this now is that this constitutes a Disruptive Event under the Access Letters Contract (ALC) and Wholesale Parcels Contract (WPC), which will impact Royal Mail’s ability to meet some of its obligations to you in our ALC and WPC.

In particular, due to the closures and restrictions in specific localities and our resultant inability to access certain areas to carry out deliveries, we anticipate that this will negatively impact our ability to deliver all Mailing Items in line with the timescales specified in the ALC (i.e. D+2 for standard letters and D+5 for Economy mail) and the WPC (i.e. D+2 for parcels). For the avoidance of doubt, as there are no Inward Mail Centres situated within the locality in question, we do not envisage any adverse impact on your ability to hand over Mailing Items as normal on Saturday 6 May.

Our Regulation Team has also informed Ofcom that Royal Mail will be treating this as a force majeure event for the purposes of meeting our USO obligations.

As normal, to mitigate the adverse impact on deliveries as much as possible, we will prepare Mailing Items which are due for delivery on Saturday 6 May and where we have access to deliver those Mailing Items, we will do so on the same day. Where we are unable to access certain localities, Mailing Items will be delivered on the next working day, which is Tuesday 9 May, although depending on the volumes some deliveries of outstanding Mailing Items may roll into Wednesday 10 May.

We are also in continuous dialogue with the Metropolitan Police and Transport for London (TFL) and will update you if any new information is provided to us which may impact on you, for example, once TFL have confirmed if there are to be any additional road closures for permitted street parties.