Royal Mail is extending the time households and businesses have to use non-barcoded stamps by a further six months.

The postal service, which had also come under fire for the limited ways people could swap-out their soon-to-be outdated stamps, plans to introduce a sixth month period of grace which pushes back its original January deadline to July.

Earlier this year Royal Mail unveiled new-look Everyday stamps featuring a barcode, which it says is designed to add improved security features and would pave the way for 'innovative services for customers'.

But the delivery service, which is undergoing an 'extensive modernisation drive' has come in for some criticism for the amount of time customers were given to use up old stamps, before needing to switch to the new-look.

As a result the deadline of January 31 and now been pushed back to July 31 - meaning that anyone who receives mail after the start of the new year without the correct-looking stamp won't face having to pay a small fine to Royal Mail in order to collect their correspondence.

Royal Mail, which is still encouraging people to use or exchange all old-style stamps by the initial January deadlie, has also confirmed it will be putting 'swap-out' forms into Post Office branches to enable customers who want to switch stamps over the course of the coming months to be able to do so more easily

Until now forms were only available online, which meant those wanting to swap needed access to both the internet and a printer to be able to use them.

In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, which had been part of a campaign to push back the use-by deadline, Matthew Parkes, managing director of stamps at Royal Mail, said: "In order to give our customers even more time to use up any remaining non-barcoded stamps, we have decided to introduce a six-month grace period starting from the original deadline of January 31, 2023, where non-barcoded stamps will still be delivered as normal.

"To make things even easier for our customers, we have also agreed with the Post Office to include the forms to enable customers to swap stamps alongside freepost envelopes in its branches.

"This means that customers will be able to fill out a form, insert it into a freepost envelope with any remaining non-barcoded stamps and hand it over for posting in a Post Office branch."

The current design of first and second class stamps, which rose to 95p and 68p in early April, have changed very little since being introduced in June 1967 and have become one of the most iconic pieces of artwork in the world having been reproduced 175 billion times.

The move to add a unique code to each stamp follows a successful national trial.