Temporary Christmas staff taken on by Angard Staffing, the Royal Mail’s staffing arm outsourced to Reed Specialist Recruitment, have complained of not receiving their pay, with some reportedly staging walkouts at offices including Bristol, Chelmsford and South London.

Other offices where the workforce has been affected include Ipswich and Norwich. Sources speaking to Recruiter said they did not know exactly how widespread the problem was.

Comments made on recruiter.co.uk and telephone calls to Recruiter magazine have highlighted issues, with the calculation of pay and cited payroll processing problems which reportedly occurred last Tuesday.

Some complainants said they had been promised all or partial payment today.

However, John Fawcett, a temporary worker at the Ipswich operation, told recruiter.co.uk that he had also been told that there was no guarantee that the problem would be fully rectified this week.

Fawcett went on to praise Royal Mail managers for being “exceptionally helpful – but they have no authority over the Angard-Reed partnership”.

At press deadlines the Royal Mail and Reed had not yet responded to inquiries from Recruiter.

Responding to two separate stories on recruiter.co.uk (’Royal Mail remains very confident in Angard’ and ’Royal Mail hits back over in-house agency’) about the administration and candidate treatment in the process of recruiting Christmas staff, jobseekers and Angard temporary employees have registered nearly 200 comments.