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All that effort to roll out barcoded stamps was well worth it then.
I wonder if this might be the beginning of the end for stamps. The privatised Royal Mail already wants to reduce or even drop entirely letter carrying in favour of parcels. I could see an inability to combat stop forgery another argument used to advance that, with phasing out stamps a way to discourage sending lettters.
The universal service obligation obliges them to carry stamps. Getting rid of that would require an act of parliament. Good luck getting that through either house
I would hope that be the case, but I don’t have a lot of faith in it. Royal Mail wants to tear up the USO, because they claim they claim they can only be a viable business without it. The ultimate goal seems to be turning RM into just another commercial parcel courier.
They are being increasingly loud about this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they eventually bend enough politicians around. The privatised water companies already managed that with the Tories wrapped around their finger.
Or they go close to bust and get renationalised.
If Labour are smart about it they'll keep the USO in place and when it's shown the business isn't profitable take the assets back into public hands at a reasonable price.
The key problem with the new stamps is there's no way for someone to check the validity themselves.
It's also just a barcode, so a fake stamp that gets used with that barcode first doesn't get stopped and the legitimate one does.
There have definitely been some batches where the barcodes have leaked.
I mean, that doesn't sound that unreasonable to me. Electronic communication has done a lot to displace snail mail, and I have a hard time seeing that changing, there being some new use that produces a lot of demand for sending very thin, flat, flexible things. On the other hand, electronic communication doesn't much replace packages. If anything, it maybe increases demand for package delivery, due to stuff like online shopping.
I would assume that the barcodes makes it far easier to find fakes. Unless they're just simple serials, in which case they're a bit boned.