Junk mail: stamp it out

When I go on holiday in ten days’ time I think I will have to take the back door key with me. After a fortnight away I certainly won’t be able to count on being able to push the front door open.
If you thought the piles of junk mail on your doormat were bad enough, they are just about to get ten times higher. Last week the Royal Mail and the Communication Workers’ Union agreed a deal that will see the floodgates open. Postmen were promised a 3.9 per cent rise in wages, and in return agreed to carry much greater quantities of blank, unaddressed mail.

You almost certainly have come across them: envelopes with no name and no address, stuffed with invitations to have your house defiled by plastic double glazing or to buy a timeshare in Ibiza. It is the postal equivalent of spam: saved the expense of having to address the letters individually, the advertisers that send them can carpet-bomb vast areas with the stuff.

There is a big difference, however, between spam and unaddressed junk mail. While the Government and internet providers have joined forces to clamp down on the former, ministers have shown no interest whatsoever in tackling the latter. Until now, the Royal Mail has imposed its own voluntary limit of three unaddressed items per household per week. But that has now been abandoned without a whimper of protest from ministers.

At least spam e-mails do not waste trees; not so the 3.3 billion items of unaddressed junk mail delivered by postmen last year. It is bizarre that the Royal Mail — which, after all, is state-owned — should be allowed to expand junk mail at the time the Government is bullying us into recycling. While the junk mailers go merrily about their business, and the Royal Mail’s coffers swell as a result, the rest of us are dealt the problem of disposing of the junk — potentially facing the same fate as Andy Tierney, of Hinckley, Leicestershire, who has issued with a GBP50 fixed penalty notice after depositing two items of junk mail in a litter bin rather than in his local recycling collection.

I know what I will be doing with unaddressed envelopes in future: I will be scribbling on them “not known at this address” and shoving them into the nearest post box. Perhaps if millions of fellow citizens do the same we might just force the Royal Mail back to what it once was: a proud public service.