When Parcels Get Thrown at the Door: Inside the Growing Evri Delivery Crisis
With Christmas fast approaching and millions of people relying on home deliveries, a troubling picture has been emerging around Evri, one of the UK’s biggest parcel firms. What should be a simple knock at the door has, for many customers, turned into a frustrating guessing game about whether their parcel will arrive at all.
Take Becky, for example. She ordered a Barbie doll for her daughter and received a notification saying it had been delivered. The problem was, there was no parcel at her door. The photo Evri sent didn’t even look familiar. After some digging, she realised she wasn’t alone. Complaints from neighbours in her Hampshire village had started to snowball. One neighbour received a delivery photo taken inside a car. No parcel ever showed up. As Becky put it, ordering online now feels like “playing Russian roulette.”
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BBC Panorama decided to dig deeper, sending an undercover reporter to work as an Evri courier. What was uncovered pointed to a system under heavy strain. Couriers described intense pressure to deliver huge volumes of parcels just to earn a basic wage. Corners, it was admitted, were being cut. Parcels were said to be left in unsafe places, thrown near doors, or marked as delivered simply so couriers could get paid.
Evri couriers are self-employed and paid per parcel. Changes to pay rates, especially the introduction of lower-paid “small packets,” were blamed for shrinking earnings. Some couriers said they were earning less than the minimum wage once fuel and vehicle costs were factored in. Larger, heavier items were also reportedly being mislabelled as small packets, meaning more work for less money. While Evri insists most parcels are correctly labelled and couriers earn well above the legal minimum, many workers told a very different story.
These pressures appear to be spilling over into customer experience. Ofcom data suggests Evri has higher rates of missing and late deliveries than the industry average. In places like Bournemouth, Poole, and Christchurch, residents reported parcels dumped in garages, alleyways, or at the wrong addresses. One woman even found herself safeguarding a pile of abandoned parcels in her flat, trying to reunite them with their owners through Facebook.
Former and current couriers say something vital has been lost. Where relationships with customers once mattered, speed and volume now dominate. Experienced drivers have walked away, leaving gaps that newer, less familiar couriers struggle to fill.
Evri says it delivers hundreds of millions of parcels a year and that most couriers do a good job. But for many customers and drivers caught in the middle, confidence has been shaken. What should be a moment of excitement at the doorstep has instead become a symbol of a system stretched to breaking point.
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