A prohibition on old non-barcoded stamps has been postponed until next summer in a remarkable victory for The Mail on Sunday and letter writers across the United Kingdom.
The Royal Mail’s climbdown also sees forms and Freepost envelopes being made available at post offices, making the process of exchanging old stamps for new ones much easier.
Royal Mail is rolling out barcoded stamps, which it states will help tackle fraud and make it easier to track posts, but an abrupt cut-off on January 31 to use old stamps led to fears that Britons, particularly the UK’s 12 million pensioners, who post much more than younger people, would be left with tens of millions of unused and useless stamps.
MPs, watchdogs and customers welcomed the move by the postal service in response to The Mail on Sunday’s campaign.
They’d urged Royal Mail to extend the looming deadline and called for the company to make it easier for those who need to change their old stamps for the new barcoded ones.
Before their intervention, customers had to download and print a form from the internet, which was unpopular among many senior people who prefer to do things face to face.
Royal Mail said that it had listened to the MoS and its customers and decided that the deadline, in less than three months, was too soon.
Matthew Parkes, managing director of stamps at Royal Mail, said that in order to give their customers even more time to use up any remaining non-barcoded stamps, they had chosen to introduce a six-month grace period commencing from the original deadline of January 31, 2023, where non-barcoded stamps would still be delivered as normal.
He said that to make things even easier for their customers, they have also agreed with the Post Office to include the forms to allow customers to exchange stamps alongside Freepost envelopes in its branches, which means that customers will be able to fill out a form, insert into a Freepost envelope with any remaining non-barcoded stamps and hand it over for posting in a Post Office branch.
Royal Mail had already changed its mind about the prohibition on pictorial stamps, such as Christmas ones, earlier this year. As a result, stamps with images, even ones that don’t carry a barcode, will continue to be valid.
Tory MP Alexander Stafford, vice chairman of Westminster’s all-party philately group, said that the Mail on Sunday was to be hailed for standing up for the rights of Royal Mail and Post Office customers across the nation.
The problem now is that stamps are a waste of money with people sending mail that never gets to where it’s supposed to go. What kind of company gets away with not doing what consumers pay for?
Royal Mail are greedy and stamps are so costly, it’s no surprise people are now sending more emails and cards electronically.
Stamps have actually no real value at all, they’re just tiny scraps of paper. It’s the service we’re paying for, which presently we’re not getting because they keep going on strike.
The change over of stamps is simple. Do the same as the Bank of England and run the old stamps for a time, with both stamps in circulation, then when all the old stamps have become outdated you can take your old stamps to the post office and swap them for the new bar-coded ones.
All they required was a bit of logic and common sense. They could have used TV and social media advertising campaign, being able to exchange old stamps for new ones at the Post Office, or perhaps even most logical of all, not changing the stamps at all, or allowing both types to be used. Britain never used to be this disorganised, what happened?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 