Postcomm consults on a redirection service for the competitive mail market

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.

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, and today Postcomm began consulting on how this could be achieved within the constraints of data protection rules.

The sharing of redirections information that residential customers and sole business traders provide to Royal Mail is classified as “personal data” under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), and any solution needs to comply with data protection rules. Postcomm is proposing changes to ensure personal data is handled properly and has established a memorandum of understanding with the Information Commissioner, who has specific responsibilities for the promotion and enforcement of the DPA, setting out how the two regulators would cooperate if UK data protection rules are broken.

Postcomm’s price control includes an allowance to enable Royal Mail to operate its redirection service, which is part of the universal postal service. Royal Mail also charges customers a fee for redirections. Today’s consultation proposes, among other things, that Royal Mail provides redirections data to other licensed operators on fair and reasonable terms, and suggests revenue-sharing arrangements as one option for dealing with redirections revenue.

Any changes will be incorporated into the licences of Royal Mail and other operators wishing to provide a redirections service. Customers would still only need to inform Royal Mail of an address change, but this information would be shared with other operators.

Notes
Today’s document, “Sharing redirection data. Postcomm’s proposals to facilitate a multi-operator redirection service”, is published on Postcomm’s website www.psc.gov.uk. Printed copies will shortly be available from Postcomm at 6 Hercules Road, London SE1 7DB. Responses are requested by 31 October 2006.