This admission is the necessary, if long overdue, first step towards fixing it. Postwatch undertook a postal survey, which showed that about one million items a week were lost. Taken with the Royal Mail’s own conservative estimate, the amount of lost mail every year is between 27 and 52 million letters.

The main cause of lost mail is delivery to the wrong address (mis delivery). Gregor McGregor, Chief Executive of Postwatch said “Customers are concerned that so much mail goes missing every year. We will be working with Royal Mail on customers’ behalf to assess whether their new measures aimed at reducing this figure are having an effect.

“We now want to see Royal Mail reduce the incidence of lost mail by about a half in order to provide major improvements to their customer service.” Lost mail is the biggest area of complaint making up about one third of all complaints to Postwatch.