Brand owners targeting households in Paignton, Devon, may have been lucky to have their mailshots delivered at all, after a local postie admitted to hoarding 30,000 letters and parcels in his house, car and garage.
Paul Willicott, a part-time postman, claimed he was overloaded and did not have enough time to deliver all the mail he was expected to handle during his four-hour round.
He became so overwhelmed he was unable to catch up and ended up stashing unopened mail in his car and in his home; some postmarked from as far back as October 2008. He was sacked last year.
Sentencing him to 280 hours of unpaid work, chair of the bench David Thompson told Willicott it was “an extremely serious matter”. He said: “People have a right to expect their mail to appear at the appointed time. This was a large amount of mail, it was obviously taken over a large period of time. It constitutes a significant breach of trust.”
Willicott was caught after a member of the public spotted him putting mail into the garage. Richard Porritt, mitigating, said: “During the course of his round he had to deliver eight bags full of post. He couldn’t do it in four hours; it took him sometimes five, sometimes five and a half hours, to get all the mail round.
“It was part of the culture that you did not take mail back to the depot unless there was a very good reason. At the end of the four hours there was a bag of post left and he was stuck behind a rock and a hard place.”
A Royal Mail spokesman said: “Every item of mail is very important to us. We have a zero tolerance approach to any dishonesty and this stance is shared by the overwhelming majority of postmen and women.”
