Royal Mail hires 3,000 'address detectives'

Its one of the most frantic jobs before Christmas: making sure your greetings cards are sent in plenty of time. But the scribbled addresses on cards in the final post are proving to be a big problem for the Royal Mail.

The service has this year been forced to hire an extra 3,000 workers to decipher bad handwriting on an estimated 400 million poorly labelled packages and envelopes. Bad spelling, illegible handwriting and neglecting to include the postcode have been highlighted as reasons for post not arriving at its intended destination.

The 3,000 extra staff, known as “address detectives”, will be based at Plymouth, Stockport, Stoke and Doxford, in Northumberland, and will join 1,400 permanent staff members who decipher addresses that cannot be read by the Royal Mail’s automated sorting machines.

Letters and parcels with addresses that cannot be sorted by hand by address detectives in sorting offices are scanned into computers and emailed to colleagues, who run internet searches to determine where the mail should be sent.

The postal service predicts it will handle a record two billion items of mail over Christmas, including 750,000 letters sent to “Father Christmas” from children.

According to figures from Postwatch, the postal service watchdog, five million Christmas cards are pulped each year by the Royal Mail because they do not have a deliverable or return address marked on them.

A Commons committee report last week revealed that 15 million items of mail are lost, damaged or stolen in the post each year. Edward Leigh, the Tory MP and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “There are still areas in the country – urban areas, particularly in London – where the postal service is chronically poor.”

Alex Batchelor, the Royal Mail’s marketing director, said: “Mail volumes almost double on peak days in December and it is important that people properly address their Christmas cards and use the postcode.”