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Christmas is a busy time for retailers and online stores, and nowhere is the pressure more keenly felt than among the people ultimately responsible for ensuring your parcels arrive - the couriers.

Here, a former self-employed delivery driver tells Sky News what it's like.

Working as a self-employed courier in the run-up to Christmas meant 16 hour days with no breaks.

It meant arriving at the depot at 4.30am to sort parcels and on some days not finishing the shift until about 11.45pm.

This time last year I worked three weeks in a row without a day off.

Physically it was very hard - and negotiating your vehicle around narrow streets, with pedestrians and children to contend with, meant it was not a safe way to work.

On average I would deliver 170 parcels a day, and on my busiest I delivered 254.

There were days when come 10pm, even though there were still parcels in the van, I would think I cannot do any more of this

But there were days when come 10pm, even though there were still parcels in the van, I would think I cannot do any more of this.

And while a lot of the customers that I knew were brilliant, I would face aggressiveness and abuse from those who expected their parcel yesterday and would see it as my fault.

Other times, you'd knock on someone's door at 9pm and get a sort of "what sort of time is this" in response.

It would often be so demanding that I would have to go home when my children got in from school and take them out with me.

Because the rounds were in a concentrated area, I could tell one to go to 28 and 29, the other to go across the street, and I would go to the next one and tell them to catch me up.

They understood the pressure of needing the income and would help as much as they could, but it was difficult.

In the three months leading up to Christmas, I would make about £9,000 - but the rest of the year I'd earn £1,000 a month, before tax and expenses.

The depot paid me for my time sorting in the morning, but otherwise it was per parcel.

For a while I had enjoyed the job - delivering, being out and about - but it was not possible to live off.

When I first started in June 2016, it was at a time when my main role was to care for my dad.

Back then if a round came up, dad would come with me and it worked well for both of us - it was good for him to be out the house and it suited my lifestyle.

In the summer of 2017 I lost him.

At that point I was up to speed as a courier, being as efficient and productive as any courier could be, doing 15 to 20 parcels an hour.

But without dad's support, my expenses increased and it became impossible to earn a living as a single parent with three teenage daughters.

Then came the introduction of a new monitoring system, which meant you had to take photographs of where you were delivering - even down to putting the parcel through the letterbox.

It was to prove that parcels were being delivered and cover the company - for example if someone asked for something to be left in a safe place and someone then helped themselves.

But it added more time to the deliveries and I didn't earn anything more - I was losing even more time and still not earning the minimum wage.

There was meant to be a pay scale based on the size of deliveries too, but quite often parcels would be identified incorrectly.

Putting something through a letterbox is quicker than having to knock, or take it to a neighbour, but a few times I had heavy parcels of 18kg or more and would get paid the [smaller] packet-size rate.

If you found out that was happening regularly, you would rightly feel aggrieved by that.

The business needs to adapt - there is no working with the couriers.

Decisions get made and if you don't like it, there is the door.