Post going to old address...
Post going to old address...
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Getragdogleg

Original Poster:

10,230 posts

213 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
Just over three years ago we moved into a rented house for 6 months while we were sorting out the purchase of the house we are in now.
I put a mail redirect in place when we moved into the rental and diligently changed all our contact addresses to the rental.
When we moved out and into the place we are in now I did the same, redirect and also changed all the addresses to the new place.

Fast forward to today and I have had a phone call from an elderly friend who is quite upset, it seems that by mistake (despite having already used our current address before a few times) he has sent something to the rented house address.

The current tenant of the house we rented has written a nasty letter to my friend telling him he is fed up of getting my post and that he is now destroying it, he has destroyed the calendar my friend has sent and has been destrying post to me for some time.

This is the first I have heard of any of this, no attempt has been made to contact me and I have had no post with the rental address on it sent on to me.

I have an unusual surname and I am very easy to find there are 3 of us in the area and we are all the same family !. Add into this that the owner of the house I rented is a good friend of mine and he has not been approached by the tenant to report a problem.

I cannot think what post is still getting delivered there apart from this one mistake and any junk mail which I have no control over anyway.

Is the tenant allowed to destroy my mail ? has he shot himself in the foot by writing to my friend to tell him he has been destroying my mail ?

what can I do about this ?


paintman

7,860 posts

220 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
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http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/26/sectio...

"(3)A person commits an offence if, intending to act to a person’s detriment and without reasonable excuse, he opens a postal packet which he knows or reasonably suspects has been incorrectly delivered to him."

Whether that would fly or not I have no idea.

The penalty:
(5)A person who commits an offence under subsection (1) or (3) shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to both.

Level 5 fine maximum is unlimited.
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/explanatory-m...



Edited by paintman on Saturday 30th September 18:13

TooMany2cvs

29,008 posts

156 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
paintman said:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/26/sectio...

"(3)A person commits an offence if, intending to act to a person’s detriment and without reasonable excuse, he opens a postal packet which he knows or reasonably suspects has been incorrectly delivered to him."

Whether that would fly or not I have no idea.
But it's been correctly delivered... It was sent to 73 Wherever Road, it was delivered to 73 Wherever Road.

Incorrectly delivered would be if it was delivered to 7 Wherever Road, despite being addressed to 73.

The new tenant is a cock. <shrug> There's nothing you can do about that.

paintman

7,860 posts

220 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
The tenant knows the packet 'has been incorrectly delivered to him'. He's written a letter to the sender admitting it.

You may be confusing it with Section 84 (1) which covers interference with mail in transmission. As the packet has been delivered to the address it is no longer in transmission.




Edited by paintman on Saturday 30th September 18:42

Hol

9,316 posts

230 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
Take round 10x pre paid and pre addressed large envelopes for the new guy to send stuff on to you.

Getragdogleg

Original Poster:

10,230 posts

213 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
I concluded that the guy may well be acting like a bit of a cock !

I will have a word with my mate who owns the house and see what he says, I don't care about junk mail but actually opening and destroying a hand written package is a bit much.

For what its worth I am still hand delivering any post for the old owners of my new house and we have been here over 2 years now.

On the one hand I am going out of my way to make sure I do things right and this bloke is being a cock.


Gareth79

9,071 posts

276 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
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Is the house local? Might be interesting to knock on the door and ask the new tenant what they are playing at.

Getragdogleg

Original Poster:

10,230 posts

213 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
Oh yes, its local. The chap that lives next door to the rental house drives the local motorfactors van and delivers to me regularly so I may well have a word with him on Monday and ask him what the bloke is like.

Then once I have the letter the cock sent my friend I will see what I can do about the whole thing.

Either a personal visit or I will go legal on him if its possible, I don't want money, I want him to be told off for being an obtuse cock.

I am furious that in this tiny community and all the easy routes to find me (house owner, bloke next door, me having high profile local small business and being local still) this bloke has not managed to do the right thing and has actively done the wrong thing and admitted it on paper.


ETA: I had a list of all the addresses I changed to the rental house from our old house and when we moved from the rental I went through the same list so I know I didn't miss any, the guy who bought our house was a gent and he put any stray post to one side for us and eventually we got it all updated to our new place. We were at our old house for 13 years so it was a big mission to sort out all the addresses. The list for the rental was quite small compared to what we discovered when firms and organisations were still sending stuff to our old house up to a year after we had moved out, loads of them I would never had got until I was given the post by the new owner.

We were only in the rental for 6 months while buying the current house and it was mostly bank and dvla and that sort of thing that was put over to that place.

Edited by Getragdogleg on Saturday 30th September 19:12

Drawweight

3,601 posts

146 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all

We also moved into temporary accommodation for a couple of months and had mail redirected.

However on the advice from the Post Office we did not inform anybody of the change of address and only did so when we moved into our permanent home.

This prevented any mail being sent to the temporary house after we left it.

Getragdogleg

Original Poster:

10,230 posts

213 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
Drawweight said:
We also moved into temporary accommodation for a couple of months and had mail redirected.

However on the advice from the Post Office we did not inform anybody of the change of address and only did so when we moved into our permanent home.

This prevented any mail being sent to the temporary house after we left it.
Great if you can get away with it but we had no choice, we had no idea when or if we were going to complete on the place we are now in, it was a gamble on the old owner getting or being denied planning permission.

If he got it he wanted at least another 100k, and we were going to walk away if he was refused he sold to us, the decision took 4 months for the council appeals people to reach, once it was refused we did the deal and were in within a couple of months.

We knew if was going to be at least 6 months in rental possibly more while we found another place to buy if this place was too much money because of having permission for a holiday cottage in the grounds made out of one of the barns. I did not want the permission anyway because I wanted to house my cars in that very barn.

Wings

5,970 posts

245 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
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It is a constant problem for landlords, with only today after visiting two blocks of rental flats I own, I came away with a carrier bag of both junk mail and mail for previous tenants, the latter for some tenants that had vacated the premises some ten years or more ago.

It never surprises me how vacating tenants are too feking disorganised and feking tight to arrange redirection of their mail, these tenants are not on social housing, but professional persons such as Doctors, Lawyers, University Lecturers etc. etc.

In the OP’s case, the tenant has only been a cock in stating in writing that he has been destroying mail addressed to the OP, and if the OP wants to receive any future wrongly delivered mail, then I would suggest the OP approaches the tenant in a friendly manner, arranging how any future mail could be collected or redirected by/to the OP.




Red Devil

13,520 posts

238 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
paintman said:
The tenant knows the packet 'has been incorrectly delivered to him'. He's written a letter to the sender admitting it.
Quite, but the offence in Section 84(3) is only complete if the tenant opens it, and does so intending to act to a person’s detriment and without reasonable excuse.
The legislation is totally silent about binning it.

However much of a censored the OP considers the tenant to be, he has no legislative support for any legal action he may contemplate trying to take against him.

With junk mail (which most usually is in such a situation), if RTS or opening it and trying to persuade the senders to desist doesn't work the only realistic option left is to consign it to the round filing cabinet.

From the OP's PoV it sucks but he is an unfortunate victim of his friend's memory lapse.

paintman

7,860 posts

220 months

Saturday 30th September 2017
quotequote all
And therein lies the problem.
Without an admission of intent or other evidence against the opener proving intent it's not going anywhere.


Edited by paintman on Saturday 30th September 21:30

Nickyboy

6,825 posts

264 months

Monday 9th October 2017
quotequote all
Apologise to your elderly friend for the new tenants being tts and move on. It’s the elderly friends fault for sending it to the wrong place albeit by accident. I have lodgers regularly and always get their post months, sometimes years after they move out. In the 3 months after they move on I’ll forward to their new address, 3-6 months I’ll return to sender as “not known” after 6 months I destroy any future mailings. There is no reason after a couple of months that any important mail should still be going to the old place, if people don’t update addresses etc then that’s unfortunately their problem

The Mad Monk

11,513 posts

147 months

Monday 9th October 2017
quotequote all
Getragdogleg said:
Great if you can get away with it but we had no choice, we had no idea when or if we were going to complete on the place we are now in, it was a gamble on the old owner getting or being denied planning permission.

If he got it he wanted at least another 100k, and we were going to walk away if he was refused he sold to us, the decision took 4 months for the council appeals people to reach, once it was refused we did the deal and were in within a couple of months.

We knew if was going to be at least 6 months in rental possibly more while we found another place to buy if this place was too much money because of having permission for a holiday cottage in the grounds made out of one of the barns. I did not want the permission anyway because I wanted to house my cars in that very barn.
So what has all that stuff about planning permission got to do with this?

SantaBarbara

3,244 posts

138 months

Monday 9th October 2017
quotequote all
Nickyboy said:
Apologise to your elderly friend for the new tenants being tts and move on. It’s the elderly friends fault for sending it to the wrong place albeit by accident. I have lodgers regularly and always get their post months, sometimes years after they move out. In the 3 months after they move on I’ll forward to their new address, 3-6 months I’ll return to sender as “not known” after 6 months I destroy any future mailings. There is no reason after a couple of months that any important mail should still be going to the old place, if people don’t update addresses etc then that’s unfortunately their problem
There are many reasons why mal may continue years after a person has moved.
You a quite wrong to destroy mail

Countdown

49,519 posts

226 months

Monday 9th October 2017
quotequote all
SantaBarbara said:
Nickyboy said:
Apologise to your elderly friend for the new tenants being tts and move on. It’s the elderly friends fault for sending it to the wrong place albeit by accident. I have lodgers regularly and always get their post months, sometimes years after they move out. In the 3 months after they move on I’ll forward to their new address, 3-6 months I’ll return to sender as “not known” after 6 months I destroy any future mailings. There is no reason after a couple of months that any important mail should still be going to the old place, if people don’t update addresses etc then that’s unfortunately their problem
There are many reasons why mal may continue years after a person has moved.
You a quite wrong to destroy mail
It's amazing how often you insist on talking complete balderdash about an incredibly wide range of topics biggrin

Nickyboy

6,825 posts

264 months

Thursday 12th October 2017
quotequote all
SantaBarbara said:
There are many reasons why mal may continue years after a person has moved.
You a quite wrong to destroy mail
It’s not addressed to me so it gets destroyed, same as junk mail. If after 6 months people haven’t changed addresses then it’s not important. If companies haven’t taken heed of 3 months of “ not at this address” then that’s their problem

superlightr

12,920 posts

293 months

Thursday 12th October 2017
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as per wings has said.

Imagine this but x 400 properties ! If we were to redirect all old post to ex-tenants we would spend our time being a post office rather than a letting agents.

egor110

17,675 posts

233 months

Thursday 12th October 2017
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Can you not just extend the royal mail redirection service you had at the rental property ?

It's quite normal to have people move in somewhere for 6 months then sometimes move to another part of the same delivery .