'Spice up your stamps'

The Royal Mail is being urged to move with the times

The Royal Mail should put celebrities such as Posh Spice on postage stamps to encourage young people to become collectors, a stamp expert has said.

Peter Jennings, a Fellow of the Royal Philatelic Society London, said the rule that living people other than the Royal Family cannot be shown results in boring stamps.

He wants the public to decide who they would like to have depicted, and said anyone from Sir Steve Redgrave to Posh Spice and David Beckham should be allowed.

Peter Jennings wants people such as the Beckhams on stamps

But the editor of Gibbons Stamp Monthly magazine, Hugh Jefferies, said such a move would result in people who had contributed little to the nation being put on stamps.

"One person's hero is another person's non-event," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"If you start issuing stamps depicting living people you will soon start getting pressure for politicians to appear. The same could also be done for entertainers and sports personalities.

"A stamp is basically just a miniature document which confirms that the fee to post a letter has been paid and a lot of people feel it should remain that way."

World Cup

The Royal Mail does celebrate major events and anniversaries but does not picture the people involved.

It issued a special stamp when England won the World Cup in 1966 but none of the team were featured.

But Mr Jennings said this results in uninspiring stamps.

He added that the rule had already been flouted when Roger Taylor, the drummer from rock group Queen, was pictured on a stamp in June 1999 with the late singer Freddie Mercury.

Personalised stamps

"Popular personalities of the moment are needed on Royal Mail stamps of the 21st Century to attract younger collectors," he said.

But Mr Jefferies said stamp collecting was no longer a popular children's hobby because it costs too much.

Ireland has a similar rule about its postage stamps which relates to the head of state.

The latest stamps are released this month

But in countries such as Australia similar rules have been scrapped. In Canada you can even personalise stamps with your own picture.

Customers send off a photograph and 25 Canadian dollars and are sent a sheet of 25 stamps featuring an empty gilt frame, and 25 tiny reproductions of their photograph to be stuck on top.

The argument comes just before the Royal Mail issues its "Hopes For The Future" stamps on 16 January, depicting the painted faces of four child models.

It gets round the ban because the children cannot be identified.

The stamps interpret four key principles of the rights of the child including a flower, which represents the right of all children to develop to their full potential.

The Royal Mail invited a number of designers to submit concepts inspired by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the work of Unicef (the United Nations Children's Fund).

The Stamp Advisory Committee Group made the final selection.