Right royal mix-up over dumped mail trolley is sorted after Citizen steps in

Red letter day: Colin Barnett with the dumped delivery trolley before it was finally collected last week

Strange goings-on in a Hackney street bear the stamp of a ‘dysfunctional’ postal service, according to a resident who discovered a Royal Mail trolley mysteriously dumped near his home.

Computer programmer Colin Barnett says Royal Mail has been delivering other people’s post to his address on and off for an astonishing 25 years.

In addition, bungling postal workers last summer inexplicably abandoned a locked, empty delivery trolley on his road.

Mr Barnett, who lives on Elrington Road near London Fields, looked after the trolley for months until post office staff finally retrieved it last week after a call from the Hackney Citizen prompted action.

Mr Barnett said: “I was so annoyed about it I had been thinking of calling Royal Mail to tell them I’d charge them £100 a day for every day I had to look after the bloody thing.”

Mr Barnett said he was fed up with the postal service long before the trolley incident because of posties regularly mixing his street up with nearby Ellingfort Road, which has a different postcode.

He said: “I complained and had a letter back once and it said the postal worker in charge would be disciplined. I thought this sounds terrible, like they are going to be waterboarded or something, but nothing changed.

“We still kept getting other people’s letters.”

A spokesperson for Royal Mail apologised and said they were not able to confirm how the trolley got to Mr Barnett’s address.