How Royal Mail finally delivered
Extended the deadline for using old stamps for six months from January 31 to July 31 next year.
Without this, letters or cards sent after January 31 with no barcode would have been treated as having no stamp at all and their recipients would have had to pay from £2.50 to receive it. We wanted the deadline extended by a year, but six months is a fair compromise.
Provided forms and freepost envelopes at post offices to swap old stamps for new ones. This means customers don’t have to go online to download and print them as they did previously, nor risk making a mistake with the address to send them to. And, crucially, a member of Post Office staff can answer any questions – and then take the envelope over the counter. In an ideal
world, staff at post offices would swap stamps there and then.
But Royal Mail says the necessary checks to ensure that postage stamps are not fake cannot be done on the spot, and we have to believe them.