Post Office Act 1908
United Kingdom legislation
The Post Office Act 1908 (8 Edw. 7. c. 48) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom
This was an extensive act covering many aspect of the mail system and some of the main provisions were: reaffirmation of the General Post Office monopoly for the carrying of mail and it gave the power to fix the postage rates to The Treasury with a minimum rate of at least one penny for an inland letter, a half-penny for a postcard, a book packet should not cost more than one halfpenny for every two ounces in weight in addition to other rates. Special rates were to be implemented for postal packets of books and papers impressed for blind people. Unpaid or deficient postage was to be charged at double the deficiency by the addressee and when rejected by the addressee, was to be returned to the sender who should pay the deficiency.
The Treasury was allowed to make regulations concerning mail with foreign countries.
Petitions and addresses to His Majesty or to Parliament, and on votes and parliamentary proceedings were allowed to be sent free though members of parliament could not receive items weighing more than thirty-two ounces postage free.
Postal censorship was permitted under provisions of the act when warrants are issued by a secretary of state in both Great Britain and in the Channel Islands.
Some of the lesser provisions were:
To provide postal services (including cash on delivery services) and telecommunication services
To provide a banking service of the kind commonly known as a giro system and such other services by means of which money may be remitted (whether by means of money orders, postal orders or otherwise) as it thinks fit
To provide data processing services
To perform services for Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, Her Majesty's Government in Northern Ireland or the government of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom or for local or national health service authorities in the United Kingdom.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28402845. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1908.
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This entry incorporates text from “Post Office Act 1908” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.