{"id":108,"date":"2006-09-08T13:21:48","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T12:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=108"},"modified":"2006-09-08T13:21:48","modified_gmt":"2006-09-08T12:21:48","slug":"roger-in-trouble-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=108","title":{"rendered":"Roger in trouble (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last time, it was South Wales postman Roger Annies who was suspended by Royal Mail for advising customers on his round how to stop receiving what RM calls door-to-door, that is unaddressed and unsolicited mail. I blogged about this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/2006\/08\/roger_in_trouble.html\">here<\/a> when I explained that, on behalf of the consumer watchdog <a href=\"http:\/\/www.postwatch.co.uk\/\">Postwatch<\/a>, I did seven interviews on the topic of junk mail.<br \/>\nNow I&#8217;ve been the subject of a complaint to the Postwatch call centre because a postman took offence at one of my broadcasts.  He felt that I was too hard on Royal Mail. You can read the short interview below and decide for yourself.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nINTERVIEW WITH ROGER DARLINGTON<br \/>\nProgramme\t:  NEWS<br \/>\nStation\t\t:  BBC TV 1<br \/>\nDate\t\t:  30\/08\/06<br \/>\nTime\t\t:  13:22<br \/>\nSOPHIE RAWORTH:  Presenter<br \/>\nYou may remember the story we told you yesterday about the postman who\u2019s been suspended for telling his customers how they could stop receiving junk mail, Roger Annies could now lose his job.  Well since then you\u2019ve been sending us hundreds of e-mails supporting what he did and web sites which block unwanted mail have been inundated with applications.  On average we get more than 600 items of junk mail every year from the Royal Mail and other senders, it\u2019s thought one-third of that goes straight into the bin but the rest we do read and it generates \u00a325-billion worth of business a year and according to the Royal Mail blocking it may not be the best thing to do.<br \/>\nWell I\u2019m joined now from Central London by Roger Darlington from Postwatch, good afternoon, thank you very much for joining us.  How much of this can we actually blame on the Royal Mail, 600 items a year per household, how much of that is coming from the Royal Mail?<br \/>\nROGER DARLINGTON:  Postwatch<br \/>\nI think the majority is probably coming from Royal Mail either as addressed items which is what most people refer to when they talk about junk mail, or through unaddressed items which Royal Mails calls door to door.<br \/>\nSOPHIE RAWORTH:<br \/>\nAnd does it make the Royal Mail an awful lot of money?<br \/>\nROGER DARLINGTON:<br \/>\nIt does make them money and of course it makes the direct mailers money otherwise they wouldn\u2019t do it, and overall that\u2019s to the benefit of customers, it helps to keep postal prices down.  But Postwatch believes that customers should have a choice and if bearing in mind these considerations they would prefer not to receive this type of mail they should be able easily to opt out of it.<br \/>\nSOPHIE RAWORTH:<br \/>\nBut the Royal Mail are saying that if you opt out of it, which you obviously can because this postman who\u2019s been suspended has told people how they can do it, the Royal Mail say that if you do that you then don\u2019t get council circulars and government circulars, important information that you probably do want to get \u2013 it seems very unfair doesn\u2019t it?<br \/>\nROGER DARLINGTON:<br \/>\nI\u2019m afraid if Royal Mail are saying that they\u2019re wrong, you will still get communications from the government about elections or other important activities even if you opt out of\u2026 of direct mail.<br \/>\nSOPHIE RAWORTH:<br \/>\nIt is an issue that really does irritate people isn\u2019t it, we have literally had hundreds of e-mails, and some people are actually calling this postman who\u2019s been suspended a national hero.<br \/>\nROGER DARLINGTON:<br \/>\nWell one of the ironies of the suspension of this postman on which I obviously can\u2019t comment, is that it\u2019s inadvertently given enormous publicity to the option to opt out, and Royal Mail must be wondering whether they\u2019ve shot themselves in the foot over this.<br \/>\nSOPHIE RAWORTH:<br \/>\nRoger Darlington, thank you very much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last time, it was South Wales postman Roger Annies who was suspended by Royal Mail for advising customers on his round how to stop receiving what RM calls door-to-door, that is unaddressed and unsolicited mail. I blogged about this here when I explained that, on behalf of the consumer watchdog Postwatch, I did seven interviews [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}