Royal Mail pulps undelivered post

Royal Mail is to destroy all undelivered business post that does not have a return address on the envelope.

The new policy comes into force from today and will affect millions of letters. It has sparked outrage among companies which claim they were not told of the change and fear it will cost them heavily in lost business.

It is the latest in a series of costcutting measures by Royal Mail that have angered customers.

In the past all undelivered post was sent to a Royal Mail office in Belfast where staff opened letters to try to discover the identity of the sender.

Royal Mail said that axing the service for business post will save on the ?10 million a year it spends dealing with 12 million undelivered items of post.

A Royal Mail spokesman said: "We are still running our returned letter centre. We spend millions trying to return undelivered mail that is not properly addressed.

"We are saying to business that if we have mail from you that is undeliverable and it has no return address on the back, we will destroy the item."

The change will have most impact on businesses that use specially-franked envelopes rather than stamps.

Emma Kane, chief executive of PR firm Redleaf Communications, said she only found out about the change in policy when she was told by her stationery firm.

She said: "I was flabbergasted. You would think that they could have told us. When I checked, Royal Mail told us they hadn't sent out the letters informing us - yet the new directive was effective from today."

The move is one of a number of measures brought in at Royal Mail under the leadership of chairman Allan Leighton and chief executive Adam Crozier.

They claim that Royal Mail needs to be far more profitable to modernise and compete against foreign rivals.

The group is in the throes of the biggest reorganisation in its history, most controversially the axing of the second delivery and its replacement with a new single delivery system.

This brought chaos to much of the nation's postal system earlier in the year, with all 15 of Royal Mail's targets for delivery of first- and second-class post missed. The company is also axing hundreds of post offices in towns and cities in a bid to restore profitability to its loss-making network.