Still getting mail after 18 months.

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We bought our new house 18 months yet we are still getting mail for the people who used to live there before.
Within the first 3-4 months, we received:
Letters from HMRC
Letters from his accountant (he is self-employed)
Tickets to a show at the O2
Debit Cards
NI cards for the children
Letters from the banks

Anyway, we called the estate agents that we bought from and asked them to pass the mail on and tell the old owners to get a redirect, as we would not be doing this again.
When we moved we had a redirect from day one and still have the redirect on now until July, which means we would have had it for 2 years.

On Valentines day last year (after we had been in house for 7 months) we returned home to find a box of flowers on the doorstep, for the woman who used to live there, fortunately the box had a contact number on its label, I messaged this number and it turned out that the husband had ordered flowers and sent them to his old address…. Who does that??
When he came to pick them up, his words were “ I wondered why they hadn’t come. Thank you very much”.

Anyway, we receive more mail from
HMRC chasing a debt
DCAs chasing the HMRC debt
His accountant forwarding letters from the HMRC chasing debt

I really don’t need to go on with the ail that we get but we if we kept all of this mail we could have been a bad mad, who would have stored all of this data and if we did, we could have had:
Names
DOB
NIN
An address (albeit the old one)
Bank Details
Credit Cards
Car Registration details
Pension Details
The list goes on…

I have called the accountant a few times, as they would be the best person to prevent most of mail coming to us, but they still haven’t done anything as they need to speak to him first, they clearly haven’t said anything, but I know they have spoken to him recently, as he has called to pay invoices, as we receive the receipts.

But my latest thing is, I received a letter from the DVLA (V11) as her vehicle tax runs out at the end of this month and I am going to write to them and get her details removed and let them know that she does not live at my address and has not done so for 18 months, in the hope that they receive a fine when they find her, as it looks like she blatantly let her VT renew at my address and not hers last year. AIBU if I do this, as I have had enough and I am just waiting for the DCA to turn up at our door.

Yes, I understand that it can be a chore getting everything in order after moving, unless we are just mega organised, as we changed our details with literally all that needed to know within a month, as 6 months prior, we were making up the list of everybody that we would have to inform and whilst we have had our redirect in place for 18 months, we do get the odd letter, but these are mainly for sales, ie a previous window company…. Nothing of any importance. But 18 months…… what would you do?

Exactly Melissa! But op opened them a year ago

Most people I'm sure will open any letters coming through their door without bothering to check if it is their name on the front. I don't see how that can be illegal.

For years I used to get mail with my address and someone else's name. I put 'return to sender' on the envelope and put them in a post box, unopened. Then, out of curiosity I opened one and it was from debt collector saying if you don't contact us we'll send bailiffs round.

I phoned them and explained, but then I got same thing from a different debt collector. They sold the info on to another debt collection company even though they knew it was false.

I got a “not known at this address. Return to sender” stamp from amazon or eBay. Just use that on all post for previous occupants. It’s been 18months now and only the odd thing comes through now. Pain in the arse though isn’t it?

Op I'd ring the DVLA and HMRC tell them what's come in the post and ask them what you can do about it. If I remember correctly just returning this kind of post (ie government agencies, not miscellaneous/junk mail) does nothing to resolve the issue and we were asked to send something like a CT bill to prove we were the current owners.
The people we bought our house from were con artists and council tax dodgers so we had parking/traffic tickets, bailiffs and fraud squad come to our address for years. At least a year of returning their post did nothing to change this so I started contacting the agencies who were looking for them.
It took about three years for the bulk of it to stop, about five years to trickle down to almost nothing. We still get the occasional letter eleven years later.
I'm not giving anyone advice but when I contacted banks to say we were getting bank and credit card statements for people I'd never heard of after we'd been in the property for several years (and previously returned a mountain of this post to sender), it would have remained unresolved had I not accidentally opened the post.
Sometimes this sort of thing happens because of disorganisation but there are people who do this maliciously and it can be awkward to disentangle your lives.
As suggested above an RTS stamp or stickers will make your life easier.

Thank you @thefirstmrsdewinter

Another thing is don't assume that if you're getting someone's letters that they must have been previous tenants or owners. What has happened to me is that you fill in a form with your correct address but it is recorded incorrectly on a database.

What happens is that in an office they look at your form, type in the post code, then look at a drop-down menu. They then click on the address that looks like yours. If 2 addresses are similar they get it wrong, even though it is quite clear what yours is.

The drop-down menu has all of the addresses for your post code, but some addresses will be obscured until they scroll down. I always make sure that the address I write down on a form is not only correct but my official address, exactly the same as on the drop-down menu. They get it wrong though. I believe that this is a contravention of the Data Protection Act when they do this.

This has happened time and time again with me. I got my free bus pass when I passed 60. But they sent it to the wrong address. I went to the other address - which differs from mine by the name of my block of flats - but they said they didn't have it.

They were nice people - I used to get some of their mail which I returned - but they didn't have it. They knew to keep any mail for me which had the name of my block of flats on it, but the letter with my pass in it didn't have that. I have got mail that's theirs even when it had their correct address on it, the postperson made a mistake.

The worse thing though was when we both had problems with 2 different energy providers claiming that they had been supplying energy for more than a year. I got a bill from British Gas for over £2,000. I tried phoning and saying I wasn't their customer, but it's what's on the database that counts. The fact that I'd been paying Scottish Power every month for more than a year meant nothing. Scottish Power had put the wrong address into the database. Then it's fixed in stone.

Hello @jennywhitehorses, the mail is definitely that of the people that lived there before. But i know what you mean with incorrect mail for said address etc.

A previous new build that my Mother bought, was a number 16 and was getting mail for a plot 16, so was receiving gas bills for that plot even though said plot no longer existed.

The plot numbers did not marry up to the eventual house numbers, but that did not stop the bills from pouring in.

DCAs came to the house took meter readings checked serial numbers, could see they did not match but still did nothing,

Mum was called to court and in the end, long story short, the DCAs backed off, as they were not her bills.