The fastest postman in Britain is Alun Vaughan, a Welsh international runner, who maintains a speed of more than 12mph when competing in long-distance races.

When he is delivering the post, however, he drops to a relatively sluggish 2mph, the pace of the average British postal delivery worker.

Two years ago he led a Royal Mail team to victory in an international corporate race in New York. His bosses, however, believe that he, like the rest of the workforce, could go faster when doing his rounds.

A row broke out at Royal Mail last week after the postal workers’ union claimed bosses were trying to get postmen and women to double their walking speed to 4mph.

British postal workers lag behind their continental counterparts. In Belgium they walk at 2.4mph, though being Belgian they would no doubt insist on calling it 3.8kph. Everyone else is speeding up, too. Most people in Britain are walking 10% faster than they were 10 years ago, according to researchers.

Doctors have even found that it is good for us. People who walk faster tend to live longer, according to the research, unless they step out in front of a bus in their hurry.

The slowness of the British postie is said to be one of the reasons for the backlog in Christmas mail. Postal workers in Preston said last week that they were racing against time to deliver a growing mountain of Christmas parcels and blamed their bosses for refusing to stump up overtime pay for extra deliveries.

A planned one-day strike against re-organisation by postal workers at sorting offices in Liverpool, Coventry, Milton Keynes, Bolton, Crewe and Stockport will further disrupt deliveries on Friday.

The quickest delivery workers in the world are probably in Singapore, but even they have trouble reaching 4mph. E-mail enthusiasts refer to postal delivery as snail mail.

Researchers from the University of Hertfordshire measured the speed of walkers in 32 cities over 60ft and found that those in Singapore averaged 3.88mph.

Posties in Singapore increased productivity by 58% over 11 years, from delivering 1,842 items a day each to 2,905 items in 2006. In Britain the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) protested last week after a postman in Evesham, Worcestershire, complained he was expected to walk at a speed of 4mph on his morning round.

The union said its members were under pressure to complete unrealistic delivery routes because of “misuse” of software called Pegasus. It claimed Royal Mail managers had been given presentations at which they were told that the “desired” walk speed was 4mph.

Royal Mail imported Pegasus from Canada and uses it to map out its 66,000 delivery rounds to 28m addresses across the UK, 23,000 of which are done entirely on foot. It says the average round is 5Å miles but takes 3Å hours to complete at an average speed of 2mph once garden paths, gravel drives and stairwells in flats are added into the equation. It denies trying to double the speed.

Vaughan, 29, from Felinheli, near Caernarfon, could do 5Å miles in less than 30 minutes if he had his running kit on. Ranked 24th in the UK over 5,000m, he said: “I run to work at my sorting office but I take my time doing my job so I don’t make mistakes. I am fairly quick but my round still takes about 3Å hours.”

The average walking speed for a human is between 2mph and 3mph, depending on height, weight, age and the terrain.

Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, said: “We are walking faster than we have ever done before. The fastest people are in Singapore but 4mph is even faster than their average.”

A Royal Mail spokesman said: “Royal Mail carefully plans every postman and postwoman’s walk so that no one is asked to cover a greater distance or deliver more mail than they are capable of doing.”

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