On the first Tuesday of every month, we open up our blog to those with lived experience of the impact of inaccessibility. We pay £150 per article.
In between times, our team will post things that we believe are important and which help support the conversations and collaborations essential to ensuring people receive the support they need to use the services they rely on.
In this post, Dan Holloway, co-founder of WhatWeNeed introduces our first list of support needs relating specifically to delivery services.
We invite your comments on that list. You can download the Excel spreadsheet of delivery support needs here. And you can download a pdf of delivery support needs here. You will find the list in text at the end of this blog.
If you have lived experience of a support need relating to delivery do comment or email info@whatweneed.support. We particularly want you to tell us any needs that we have not currently included, or any needs that we could phrase better in order to capture the support that would give you the most practical help.
And if you would like to write a blog about the impact of delivery companies failing to meet a support need of yours, please email us an idea. We publish a lived experience blog every month and pay £150 for this.
If you are involved in a business sector that provides delivery services or uses delivery firms, we would like to hear from you. In particular, we would like to hear the practical barriers that are currently standing in the way of meeting people’s support needs. We would like to hear what needs you are able to meet right now. And we would like to hear what your plans are to meet the range of needs expressed in our list.
The Impact of Inaccessible Delivery
Many of us who are disabled rely on the delivery of goods we need for day to day living, let alone to enable us to access things that might give our lives richness or pleasure.
Which is why it can be so frustrating that delivery companies themselves often feel more inaccessible to us than any other essential service provider.
Surveys and reports from organizations such as Which back up our frustration. Citizens Advice publishes an annual league table, and the most recent, from November 2023, tells a familiar story. It singles out the fact firms are “failing disabled customers.” To quote:
“almost all parcel firms scored 2 stars or below when it came to meeting the needs of disabled customers or individuals who require adjustments to how they receive parcels. An estimated 7.2 million people have an accessibility need they’d like to share with their parcel delivery company. However almost half (45%) of these people were unable to do so.”
Citizens Advice
The prevalence of dissatisfaction is startling. And the frequency with which people’s support needs either can’t be met or are ignored is hugely disappointing. This can range from leaving parcels in inaccessible locations to failing to acknowledge people’s instructions related to accessibility needs.
Delivery services are also in a unique position among essential service providers. So many other sectors are unable to support us in the way we need if the delivery companies they rely on cannot do so as well.
My worst experience of delivery came when our washing machine broke. I am very fortunate to be physically robust, but we have a small car, and even I can’t carry a washing machine, including concrete ballast, the miles from the store to our home.
So I needed to get it delivered. What I hadn’t realised is that this would be the hardest part of the enterprise. Because the store (all names omitted to protect those who may have improved since) that offered the best price for a machine required a phone number to allow me to fill in the delivery request, so they could call to arrange delivery.
But I am unable to take incoming calls. Having a telephone “on” is in itself a source of trauma, and means that while it is on I can do nothing but sit in a corner of the room, waiting for my life to collapse, thinking about nothing but when it will be over. And actually receiving calls raises anxiety so high that I am liable to lose my speech altogether. Add auditory processing issues and I am unlikely to understand what is being said to me while I have lost speech.
So I went into the store (an hour on the bus) concerned to se if this was a website glitch. It wasn’t. They literally could not arrange a delivery without their warehouse calling us. I told the person behind the till, and their supervisor, that I was disabled. I explained what the impact on me was, in a crowded store with people who could overhear my intimate and distressing medical history. No use.
I explained the equality Act. No use.
So I steeled myself to go home (another hour on the bus), sat in the quiet and dark long enough to switch the phone on and make an outgoing call, preparing every script I could to say what I needed to in order to get customer service, who surely had received the training the store hadn’t, to understand their obligation in law to offer me accessible communication and, in the 21st century, receive an email not a phone call saying “we’re on the way.” How hard could that be?
Apparently, impossible. More intimate medical history to strangers to no avail. And I was wrung out. A whole day of annual leave wasted. No washing machine. It was the next day before I had recovered enough to find a company who could deliver without a phone call. But at considerably more cost.
Current Regulation
Delivery companies fall under the regulation of Ofcom. In 2022 Ofcom strengthened the protections they require firms providing a postal like delivery service to give to disabled consumers. They did this by introducing a new Consumer Protection. Consumer Protection 5 lays out very clearly what Ofcom expects delivery firms to do.
The main requirement is for any firm providing a delivery service to have a policy in place that describes three things
- How disabled consumers can communicate their need to the firm regarding the delivery of a parcel.
- How the firm’s employees should fulfil that need when they deliver the parcel.
- How the impact and effectiveness of the policies will be measured.
Firms must also make employees aware of their policy and train them to carry it out.
Clearly this isn’t happening in many cases. And this has a negative impact on consumers’ wellbeing. But also, as we have seen, on the reputation of the firms themselves.
Complications
So why aren’t firms, um, delivering?
One reason is the relationship between retailers and delivery firms. This makes it hard for us as consumers to know whether our accessibility needs will be met when we place an order. Because most of the time when we ask for a firm to deliver something to us, we are not asking the delivery firm. We are asking another firm, which then uses the services of a delivery firm to get their product to us.
This means also there are many layers our needs have to pass through in order to ensure a smooth service. And many opportunities for things to go wrong. This could be a failure of a retailer to communicate with a courier. It could be a lack of awareness on behalf of a retailer meaning we cannot state our needs. It could be a failure of communication at any stage between the courier, the printing of instructions, and the driver making the delivery. Or it could be a fear of passing on “sensitive information.”
Even when delivery is “in house” there are multiple communications needed. Between the shop and the back room. Between warehouse and driver. And of course, there is the pressure on drivers to meet timing targets that means compliance with our needs is a low priority for them. And also for a sales team that needs to keep prices low by swift turnaround.
As so often, there is a risk of accessibility becoming a premium service. Or of a price rise across the board, leading to resentment towards disabled consumers.
Because the relationship between delivery firms and retailers is complicated, we have limited the scope of support needs at this stage. What we do not yet have are support needs relating to the relationship between retailers who use a third party delivery firm and consumers.
The assumption at present is that retailers and others who use delivery firms would pass these support needs straight to those delivery firms. We are, of course, eager to hear what support we are missing as a result, and most important how it could be implemented.
The Business Case
If any partnership between a retailer and delivery firm worked out a way to ensure that what we ask for when we place our order is what’s “delivered” then they would have a huge competitive advantage among disabled consumers.
But it may go beyond that, such is the widespread dissatisfaction with delivery firms. While Citizens Advice found disabled consumers rated delivery firms 2 stars or lower, the overall rating for all firms was only between 2 and 2.75 stars.
Accessible delivery may be a classic case of inclusive design that benefits all. and a firm that gets it right in its own operation and in its partnerships has potentially vast reputational and financial rewards to reap.
Support Needs Relating To Delivery
Note that we have included some support that relates to the food delivery sector. This sector is not subject to the same Ofcom regulation as parcel delivery.
Download the list of support needs relating to delivery as an Excel document by clicking this link.
highest impact/frequency and easiest implementation
- please allow extra time for me to get to the door
- please read and follow any special instructions and notify me if you cannot fulfil them
- if I am not in, please do not leave a parcel unless I have given instructiona
- I need you to leave my parcel in a place I can reach if you leave it outside
- I need you to bring the parcel inside and leave it in a place I can reach it
- please use the doorbell
- please allow me extra time when signing
- please knock loudly
high impact but harder to implement
- I need you to open the parcel for me
- I cannot access collection points. If you cannot deliver please redeliver to my home
- If you deliver to a collection point, I need there to be onsite parking I can use
- I may need to cancel a timed delivery at very short notice. Please enable me to do this
support needs and principles from other contexts that also apply to delivery
- communication with the delivery firm, especially customer service and timing updates, and its drivers needs to be in a format the customer can uses
- delivery platforms need to be accessibly designed
- delivery drivers need to interact with customers in a way that is accessible for customers, including understanding social difficulties, or unexpected actions or appearance
support needs relating to food delivery
- Please provide a single use positionable plastic straw
- I have a very severe allergy need you to transport my delivery in a container that has never been used to carry nuts
- please do not include any free extras that I have not ordered
- please bring my delivery inside and place it on the table
- please bring my delivery inside and open any boxes for me
What We Need 