Neil McEvoy claims up to half his election leaflets haven’t been delivered by Royal Mail
Martin Shipton
Former Plaid Cymru MS Neil McEvoy is claiming that thousands of leaflets for his new party Propel have not been delivered by Royal Mail.
Mr McEvoy was a regional MS for South Wales Central from 2016 until 2021.
After being expelled by Plaid following a series of complaints made about him, he set up a new party called Propel, of which he is the leader. In the general election he is a Propel candidate in Cardiff West.
Every candidate is entitled to have a leaflet delivered free of charge to each household in the constituency where they are standing. Mr McEvoy says he has been contacted by people across Cardiff West who haven’t received his leaflet.
Investigating
He said: “The Royal Mail are investigating. The longer this is up on social media, the more posts I’m getting and the more people are getting in touch with me to say they’ve not had the leaflet.
“Just minutes ago someone from a different part of Radyr got in touch and said they’d got nothing off us. It’s just appalling, really.
“It’s looking at maybe 50% coverage of the constituency only, which is just completely unfair. It’s not our election really, because obviously we’re aiming more at the Senedd election in 2026. It’s a ‘let’s get out there’ exercise essentially and the Royal Mail has just not upheld their part of the bargain.
“We’ll want compensating for the expense we’ve gone to. It’s appalling really.”
Mr McEvoy said he had delivered 50,000 leaflets to Royal Mail for delivery to every household in the constituency.
“I’m picking up 1,100 leaflets that are left over. Where have the rest gone? My suspicion is that they have been binned.”
He said that after the election he and party colleagues would be visiting everyone who had reported not getting a leaflet and that a compensation claim would be made to the Royal Mail.
Mr McEvoy retained his seat on Cardiff council in 2022, standing as a Propel candidate in the Fairwater ward.
Support our Nation today
For the price of a cup of coffee a month you can help us create an independent, not-for-profit, national news service for the people of Wales, by the people of Wales.
This is bad news for Propel.
Their projected vote will now be 5 votes, down from the usual 10.
Always someone else’s fault!!
Dai Rob may think he is clever supporting the crooked and rotten Plaid-Labour establishment but I think in 2026 they may have a nasty surprise.
The Independent candidate in Islwyn and Newport had his delivered to wrong postcodes by RM, they went to another constituency.
Problems in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr where Royal Mails addressing software has mangled the addresses, affecting all parties. We got one addressed to Berriew, Shrewsbury SY5. Perhaps this is a problem in the case reported here?
Not good enough whatever the reason.
It’s quite incredible. We have the email from the Royal Mail confirming everything was in order. Day after day members & supporters got in touch asking where our leaflet was; some had 3 Labour leaflets in that through the post & nothing from us. We won’t let this go.
Where I live I only received two leaflets, one Conservative and one Labour, that’s it, no canvasing, no election posters anywhere. If you live in a safe seat you are just taken for granted.
Nobody round here got their polling cards, and if most of the parties sent out leaflets, we didn’t get them. Tell a lie, we did get one polling card for the PCC election, though a month after polling date. Our postman has started a sideline cleaning people’s guttering, he can evidently see the writing is on the wall too.
This is the time of year that Royal Mail says is the quiet period and takes 24min off the working day., they also refuse to book overtime because of a (small) payment for the leaflets. I imagine there will be hundreds of thousands of binned leaflets, maybe more. Nobody cares unfortunately.