470 Royal Mail jobs as parcel centre opens for Christmas rush

The temporary base will be in Wolverhampton and is one of 10 opening up nationwide. It is the fourth consecutive year such a centre will open up in the city.

It will span bays four, five and six at the existing Parcel Sorting Centre on Stafford Road.

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 10 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 three 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."

In total, 19,000 temporary festive workers will be taken nationwide. In the Midlands alone, 400 million items of mail are expected to be delivered over the next two months.

The parcel centres will open on a phased basis from November 3, with Wolverhampton set to be one of the busiest. The others will be based in Bathgate, Leeds, South Wales, Manchester, Greenford, Peterborough, Swindon and Milton Keynes. There will also be an international parcel sorting centre at Heathrow. Temporary employees will sort a significant proportion of the parcels handled over Christmas before they are distributed around the UK.

Today's news comes after Royal Mail announced earlier this month that it would be taking on 863 recruits in Wolverhampton to work shifts spanning 24 hours a day from November to early January.

The workers will be stationed at the North West Midlands Mail Centre on Sun Street – which handles mail for the whole of Staffordshire and the Black Country – and the Parcel Sorting Centre on Stafford Road.

They will be paid between £6.50 and £9.94 per hour for a variety of roles, including sorting through Christmas cards and gifts before they are taken to delivery offices, unloading mail from vans, transporting it around in trolleys and operating machinery.

The extra staff will supplement the company's 18,000 postal workers in the Midlands.

The mail centres in Wolverhampton can process up to one million items per shift over Christmas, with the rise in online shopping credited as having sparked a surge in the number of festive parcels delivered in recent years.