No post in more than 60 areas of the West Midlands - this is what is happening at Royal Mail

There have been reports of problems in Shifnal, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Telford, and Newport - by no means an exhaustive list - with significant numbers of residents saying they have not received any mail since Christmas.

But is it really all down to the weather? We have had a few days of snow, certainly, but nothing on the scale of the infamous winters of 1947, 1963, 1982 or even 2010 and 2011, when the post still managed to get through.

Mike Wood, MP for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire, is far from convinced. 

"They're partly putting it down to Storm Goretti," he says. "That will have caused a few problems, but the problems have been going on for a long time, although they have certainly been getting worse over the past six months."

When Shaun Davies, MP for Telford, recently raised the matter in the House of Commons, he reported an anecdote which has become increasingly familiar in recent weeks.

"Posties have contacted me privately to tell me that they have been ordered not to deliver post and to prioritise parcels,"he told fellow MPs this week. Sir Alan Campbell, leader of the House of Commons, replied that he had heard exactly the same rumour this week. These rumours are rife on the streets of the West Midlands. A man from Dudley, who asked not to be named, said his own postman had said he was under instruction to prioritise parcel deliveries over letters. 

"He told me that some of the letters he was delivering had been sat on for three weeks," he said.

In October last year, Royal Mail was fined £21 million by regulator Ofcom for failing to meet its targets for first and second class mail. It was the third consecutive year the operator had been fined for its poor performance, and in the past week, both Mr Davies and Mark Pritchard, his neighbouring MP for The Wrekin, have lodged separate complaints with Ofcom.

So what is going wrong with the service?

A Royal Mail spokeswoman, who declined to be named, denied that postal workers were being instructed to cut back on delivering letters, and to instead focus on the more lucrative parcel side of the business. 

"Ofcom has looked into this claim previously and found no evidence that Royal Mail instructs the prioritisation of parcels over letters outside of these recognised contingency plans," she says.

"It’s important to understand that during exceptionally busy periods, delivery offices can become very busy. Parcels take up far more space than letters, and in large numbers they can block walkways and create health and safety risks. In those moments, clearing parcels first is sometimes necessary to keep offices safe and to ensure all mail, including letters, continues to move through the network."

Mr Wood, who represented the Dudley South seat before boundary changes, has compiled a diary of the problems raised by 22 separate constituents over the past three years.

"I'm seriously concerned that people in Kingswinford have not been receiving letters on time via Royal Mail, with post sometimes taking up to two weeks to arrive," he says.