Hundreds of Christmas jobs on offer as Royal Mail opens temporary sorting office

A total of 640 jobs will be available at the centre, which is one of 10 being opened across the UK this festive season.

It will be open in mid-November and based at Citygate Park on Stafford Road.

It is the fifth year running that Royal Mail has opened the centres, which will sort a significant proportion of the parcels the company handles during the busy Christmas period before they are distributed around the UK.

The other centres will be based in Bathgate, Bradford, Newport, Manchester, Greenford, Peterborough, Swindon, and Bletchley. There will also be an international parcel sort centre based at Heathrow. They will open on a phased basis from Monday November 2.

Around 3,000 seasonal workers will be based at the 10 sites and they are part of the 19,000 seasonal workers being taken on by Royal Mail this year.

Geoff Braden, Royal Mail's operation director, said: "Christmas is the busiest time of year for Royal Mail and our customers. Royal Mail is again investing in ten temporary parcel sort centres to increase our scale and improve our flexibility during this important time of year for our customers.

"The use of additional parcel sort centres has proved extremely successful over the past four years. They are now an integral part of Royal Mail's substantial financial commitment in additional resources at Christmas to handle the festive mail bag as effectively as possible."

The parcel sort centres are run by dedicated management teams, supported by a team of workplace coaches who train new recruits to sort the huge number of parcels the centres will deal with this Christmas.

Royal Mail workplace coach Laki Gill added: "Every year we welcome back seasonal workers, who look forward to joining us to help sort letters and parcels to make sure they get to our customers in time for Christmas.

"We provide full training and support for the job and we welcome all ages – we have young unemployed people working alongside retired people and there is a real sense of festive spirit around the place."

People can apply for the jobs at www.royalmailgroup.com/xmasjobs