Parish clerk redirection of mail

Question

The parish clerk is retiring and has charged the parish business rates for a postal redirection service. The current address is her home address also served by another Parish council (to which she re retiring from and has also paid for a redirection of mail service) plus used for her own correspondence.
With multiple users this cannot happen and if one is used all mail will go to that nominated ie in this case the new clerk. I will assume as well that all mail will be addressed to the clerk by name  and therefore until the mail is opened the recipient will not be known.

The clerk refuses to explain how this service expects to work. What action can be taken for complete transparancy.

Answer 1

The trouble is with small Councils they don’t have an office and the Council’s address will be the Clerk’s home address.  Just get your new Clerk as one of her first jobs to notify everyone the new address.
Regarding opening post they should know whether it is for them or not by the address and contact name on the envelope so should have no need to open something for the Council they have retired from.

 Do you actually receive much in the Royal Mail, I would be surprised if you do as the majority of items are now sent via email, so I would just leave it and see what is actually sent on

Comments

From experience here ....I took over a small rural PC who was responsible for a village hall. ALL postal mail, most of it t to do with the running of the VH, was addressed to the former clerk. It took months to change over names and address and she was alive, goodness knows if she'd been deceased. I transferred all Council correspondence to the VH address. As already stated most stuff now is digital. However, out Borough Council still uses the postal system.
The parish were I'm Cllr uses the Church as its postal address. It's a small rural Parish with very little post Mail. It works well. Other alternatives I've heard of are a PO box address but this would incur costs.

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It goes without saying that the clerk will use their home address as their contact address as our new clerk will do.  The point that in this situation is that the clerk manages two parish councils ,is retiring from both ( the contact address for both is the clerk's home address) has claimed expenses from both for postal redirection. I neglected to mention that the clerk is also moving house!
If I was to write to my clerk I would just use the clerks name followed by the address as I think most would do hence until the mail is opened one would not know from whom it had come. Our clerk must receive a lot of mail if a six month redirection service was requested ?!

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Mail for the parish council should be addressed to the parish council, not the clerk , if sent by mail.  But I agree, very very rare to receive mail by post these days

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Whatever is decided Council should risk assess to ensure it can continue to carry out its business and legal obligations regardless of whether a Clerk is in post or not.

Answer 2

The Royal Mail charge on the redirection service is per business trading name not per address because it is sorted differently based on who it is  for. If the parish council name isn't on the address then it won't get redirected. Same as if you move house, your can redirect your own post but post for the new occupier should still get delivered to them.