i found this to be a very vague answer and on looking at the coin again it is definately a P and not a worn R!!! any help would be much appreciated =)
cheers

Nobody will actually know how many pound coins have been minted with slight errors on them.

So many coins are struck at the Royal Mint at Llantrisant that it’s physically impossible to check every one for an error.

Both Joel and Mark appear to have in their posession a £1 coin with some slight errors on them.
There are bound to be others in circulation but not that many i bet, possibly a few hundred or maybe less.

These coins are worth holding onto not because they are valuable but because they are rare and to a true collector represent an error at the mint which has gone undetected.

With the countless millions of coins minted annually one with anything slightly wrong with it is certainly worth more than it’s face value.

Well the Royal Mint in Llantrisant South Wales have minted many millions of the newly designed 20p piece but accidentally struck only a small number of them without any date whatsoever before realising their mistake.

Many of them will have been returned by the Banks and Post Offices but quite a few thousand reached peoples change.

The last time any coin struck by the Royal Mint had no identifying year of issue on it ( a date) occurred in the reign of Charles 2nd in the 1630-40.

We can be pretty sure that measures have been put in place to ensure it never happens again.

Anyone in possession of one of these MULE coins should keep it safe knowing they own a piece of history.

Why sell it for a fairly small sum of money when you can hand it down to the next generation.

There are many rarer and more valuable coins such as the 1903 Penny but apart from only one other they all have a date somewhere stamped on them.

thank you

I promised to return to one of the most intriguing stories of 2009 – the announcement made by The London Mint Office that it would pay £50 for specimens of the undated 20p. To refresh your memory, this issue arose when the Royal Mint changed the design of all our circulation coins in 2008. A rare error occurred in the production of the new 20p caused by the decision to switch the date from one side to the other on the new design. A die from the old 20p was inadvertently used for one side in conjunction with the correct, new die for the other, meaning that the year of issue was left off completely (in numismatic circles this is referred to as a “mule” – a cross between two different coins). There’s plenty more on the background at our excellent web site: The Royal Mint has always been unable or unwilling to clarify exactly how many coins were affected. Their web site states, as it always has done, that an unspecified number of “less than 250,000″ were struck. Obviously at the time of making our offer, some of our financial people were a little concerned about the possibility of paying £50 for each of these. Certain coin dealers were even suggesting that the imagined plentiful supply would lead to market prices dropping to £10 by the start of 2010.

Nick Hart, one of our coin experts, was right all along. He claimed that the number of undated 20p’s out there was much lower than the 250,000 level. His predictions that our offer would only receive a few hundred redemptions, despite the enormous publicity that the story garnered, proved to be completely correct. Clearly this story has some way to run and the value of these coins is only going to increase. Maybe we should do something about that