Postcomm publishes revised proposals on Royal Mail's redirections service

Postcomm, the independent regulator for postal services, has published its proposals on Royal Mail’s redirections service.

In the fully competitive market, where rivals of Royal Mail are also able to offer their own collection and delivery services, redirection arrangements need to be broadened to allow those rivals to redirect mail. Postcomm has consulted on how this could be achieved within the constraints of data protection rules.

Some of the recommendations Postcomm is making are:

– Royal Mail be required to share the redirections data with other licensed operators who wish to provide a redirections service;
– Once an operator chooses to access redirections data, it must provide a redirections service for its area of operations;
– Royal Mail share the data with other licensed operators from its business diversion service (which Postcomm considers is essentially a subset of the redirections service);
– Other operators wishing to provide a redirections service should be allowed to update their senders with the new address of their customers where the appropriate consent has been given; and
– All licensed operators will be able to not redirect mail if they have explicit instructions to that effect from the sender.

Every year, around 1.3 million households and businesses use Royal Mail’s redirections service, and there are approximately 800,000 redirections “live” on the company’s books at any one time.