Ever been frustrated waiting for someone to a reply to your email or letter?

Well imagine the reaction of a former Merton councillor after it took the Mayor of London four years to respond to his enquiry.

Patient Mick Spacey, 67, spent 1,332 days, five hours and 58 minutes waiting for a reply to his email, before he finally received a memo stating his message had been deleted without being read.

The spurned correspondence - offering first Ken Livingstone and then Boris Johnson a fact-finding visit to Europe’s largest recycling centre - left the incredulous Crossway resident seething.

He said: “The reply might as well have said f-off, we’re just going to delete the email anyway. Well done Ken and well done Boris.

“I was offering to take representatives of the Mayor to a facility way ahead of anything in this country, and didn’t even get a reply.”

He added: “How can something just sit there for four years. You’d think they’s have the courtesy to reply. It makes you wonder how much they care about what voters really think.”

A spokeswoman for the Greater London Authority said the automated message had been sent in error and the Mayor’s IT service desk should have subsequently been in touch with Mr Spacey to apologise for the fault.

She added: “An automated email message was sent by mistake to some people, wrongly saying their email to the Greater London Authority had been deleted without being read.

“We apologise to anyone who received this erroneous message and would like to assure Londoners that all correspondence to the Mayor and Greater London Authority is read and dealt with within 20 working days."