In 2010, at around the time the DMA was discussing whether or not the Your Choice Dummy Scheme could possibly at least vaguely resemble a genuine opt-out service, I was in contact with the policy advisor who managed the responsibility deal on behalf of Defra. I was unaware the DMA was worried Your Choice's failure could inspire Defra to push for a change in legislation that would impact the Direct Mail as well as Door Drop sectors. The reason I had contacted Defra was that the responsibility deal (of which the Your Choice scheme was part) appeared to be dead and buried. I wanted to know if Defra was satisfied with how its responsibility deal was going.

My discussions with Defra confirmed my suspicions. The policy advisor was unaware only 1,600 household had registered with Your Choice, even though the information was in a report the DMA had written for Defra in 2009. He also confirmed that the responsibility deal hadn't been reviewed, as was supposed to have happened in late 2008. It seemed clear Defra had lost interest in the junk mail issue.

However, that wasn't the end of the story — there was to be one final (and rather dramatic) chapter. In November 2011, Defra announced a brand new opt-out scheme for unaddressed mail. The Your Choice scheme and Royal Mail's Door-to-Door Opt-Out would be scrapped and replaced by a new service. What's more, people would finally be able to opt-out online — a brand new website was to go live in April 2012.

The agreement

The agreement was the third voluntary producer responsibility deal with the junk mail industry. It didn't explicitly mention that Your Choice and the Door-to-Door Opt-Out would be scrapped; the agreement simply stated that the DMA would develop and promote an improved single contact preference service for unaddressed mail by April 2012 and that the new scheme was underpinned by three key principles:

• It should be flexible, simple to use and access, and enable consumers to make an effective choice over what unaddressed mail they receive.
• It should ensure that legally required materials are still delivered (e.g. electoral roll registration).
• It should be designed to ensure that it does not unduly restrict the activities of local communities, charities and local small businesses (e.g. a blanket ban on anything through the letterbox).

The first bullet point effectively confirms that households would be able to opt-out online (simple to use and access) and the second bullet point suggests the industry would stop using scare tactics to discourage people from registering (I had repeatedly raised the outlandish warnings about missing "important information from central and local government" with Defra). The final bullet point confirms that the opt-out would only cover unaddressed mail distributed by Royal Mail and members of the DMA. Local leaflet distribution companies (none of whom are a member of the DMA) and companies or individuals hand-delivering leaflets would not have check if a household is opted out.

In other words, the opt-out service would be a relatively modest improvement. Instead of sending paper opt-out forms to Royal Mail and the DMA, junk mail haters would be able to opt-out online. However, any unaddressed mail distributed by other companies would still be unregulated.

Interestingly, the DMA (and presumably Royal Mail) felt the opt-out regime would be unfair. Its members would need to check which households had opted out, while non-regulated distributors could continue their carpet-bombing campaigns. You can argue the DMA and Royal Mail had only themselves to blame, as they had invented opt-out schemes for unaddressed mail. They could have instead introduced a proper sticker scheme, which would apply to all advertisers and distributors. In any case, this issue was addressed in the agreement. The section about the scope of the agreement states that Defra would try to make sure unregulated distributors also play their part:

The UK, Scottish and Welsh Governments recognise there is a risk that if the burdens placed on the direct marketing industry by this responsibility deal are significant, then this could simply result in a shift in communications to other delivery channels not included in this agreement (e.g. leaflets delivered via free newspapers; leaflets inserted within directories) which could undermine the environmental benefits sought. Therefore, Defra will commit to engage with other parts of industry that are delivering unaddressed printed material to householders with a view to improving the environmental performance of these other delivery channels.

It is unclear what exactly Defra was going to undertake to improve the environmental impact of the other parts of industry that are delivering unaddressed printed material. However, the press release announcing the new scheme did give a hint:

This [agreement] also throws down the gauntlet to those companies hand-delivering brochures and fast-food menus to respect ‘no junk mail’ signs and only deliver what people want.

In other words, the other delivery channels were put on notice. They had to start respecting 'no junk mail' signs, and failure to do so might lead to further action. I very much doubt that action would have been statutory legislation but I can see a system whereby complaints about advertisers and/or distributors ignoring 'no junk mail' sign could be part of the remit of the Advertising Standards Authority. However, what exactly they had in mind (if anything) is unknown.

I should add that the press release was a little confused. For instance, it states that the new opt-out website would replace the current out-dated system, where households have to register on three separate websites or apply by post to stop the different types of unwanted direct mail from being delivered. One of the main problems with the Door-to-Door Opt-Out and Your Choice Dummy Scheme is that they don't have a website. There is just one opt-out website for junk mail — the Mailing Preference Service — and that website wasn't part of the agreement. The MPS would continue to function independently from the new opt-out service.

The Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, added to the confusion in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live. Among others, she claimed people would be able to pick and choose what type of junk leaflets they want to receive:

You just log on to the one website and then you can say, very clearly, I want to go on receiving information from charities, for example, because people like that — if they want to do the right thing to help needy people — but I don't want any of the other unsolicited junk mail that I'm getting. So it can be quite tailored to what your preferences are.

This is not at all how the opt-out scheme would work. Opting out would stop all unaddressed mail distributed by Royal Mail and members of the DMA, with the exception of legally required materials. An opt-out/opt-in scheme was never on the agenda.

The disagreement

The Door-Drop Preference Service was supposed to be launched in April 2012. That didn't happen. April came and went, and there was no sign of any opt-out website. Eary May, I asked the DMA and Defra why the website hadn't been launched but didn't get a straight answer. My next step was to submit a Freedom of Information request to Defra, to which I did get a proper a response. The stack of papers I received in July 2012 was incomplete but did reveal what had gone wrong. The main issue was that the DMA and Defra disagreed about what they had agreed.

The steering group that never met

Before I get to all the juicy details, it is worth mentioning that the agreement between the DMA and Defra stated that a steering group would be set up to ensure the responsibility deal remains on track to achieve its objective, review how emerging environmental priorities / challenges can be reflected in the deal and to propose amendments to the deal as appropriate. The group would be made up of all the involved parties and WRAP, which describes itself as a "climate action NGO". The group would meet regularly but it never did, even though quite a challenge had emerged. WRAP did ask Defra in January 2012 if there would be meeting, and Defra's policy advisor told them they were still waiting for the DMA to arrange the first steering group. WRAP never followed this up and they stayed quiet when the responsibility collapsed.

The delay (and what to do when the Daily Mail comes calling)

Defra only learnt on on 5th April 2012 that the opt-out website wouldn't be launched. Mike Lordan, Chief of Operations at the DMA, sent Defra two drafts of a press holding statement that could be used should anyone ask why the scheme hadn't been launched yet:

• One of the measures pledged in the agreement between the DMA and Defra to cut physical waste and carbon emissions produced by the DM industry was the introduction of a new single-contact preference service for householders to opt out of receiving all types of advertising mail. Initially, this website was earmarked to go live in April 2012. The launch of the service has been temporarily delayed because Defra's continuing negotiations with other organisations representing companies that deliver unaddressed printed materials to householders, such as free newspapers. To ensure householders enjoy a fully effective service, it needs full industry backing. It is expected that the website will go live in the summer.
• The new single-contact preference service that was due to go live in April has been delayed until the summer due to continuing negotiations with other parties that were committed to, as part of the agreement, yet to being finalised.

Defra's policy advisor replied that he liked the "simpler one". I guess he preferred the short version because he didn't agree with the implicit accusation in the longer version; namely that Defra was to blame for the delay. Whatever his thinking was, he didn't dispute the accuracy of the first holding statement.

As mentioned, the first person to ask why the scheme hadn't gone live was me — I got the holding statement on 2nd May. After I asked some more questions Tristan Garrick, the DMA's PR Manager, told me I would get a call from Mike Lordan, whose title was "Chief of Operations". He never phoned me, which is what prompted me to submit the Freedom of Information request. And, the Freedom of Information request revealed why the DMA and Defra didn't want to answer any questions about the opt-out website. By contacting them I had sparked a row.

The row started with an email from Tristan Garrick to Mike Lordan, the Defra policy advisor and Defra's press officer). Garrick stressed the need to agree our position on what to say about why the single opt-out preference service website has yet to go live. He wasn't worried about me asking horrible questions (the DMA has always routinely ignored me) but he was worried I had some very good contacts in the consumer press. Apparently, I was particularly cozy with the Daily Mail, and he expected a journalist to call within the next few days. He didn't need to worry about that. The Daily Mail did regularly run anti-junk mail stories but they didn't like me at all. I always pointed out factual errors in Daily Mail articles on my blog and routinely referred to the paper as the Daily Fascist.

Anyway, Garrick's proposal was to use the press holding statement the DMA had drafted on 5 April. As mentioned, Defra's policy advisor hadn't objected to the accusation that Defra was to blame for the delay. However, Defra's press officer did object when she read the statement. The following day, 3rd May 2012, she told Garrick there was no reason for the DMA to not go ahead with the launch of the opt-out website. The responsibility deal stated that Defra would commit to engage with other parts of the industry but not that the opt-out website would only be launched once those other parts had been successfully engaged.

Mike Lordan didn't agree. The same day he replied to press officer:

The key players in our Industry […] do not agree that Defra have done what they committed to in the agreement. The major sticking point is the sentence that says: Therefore, Defra will commit to engage with other parts of industry that are delivering unaddressed printed material to householders with a view to improving the environmental performance of those other delivery channels'. We do not accept that this has been done in any meaningful way. Without this it would not achieve the first bullet point on the next page of the agreement.

The bullet point Lordan referred to talks about reducing the quantity of direct marketing material and achieving an acceptable return on investment through better targeting and suppression. In other words, the DMA wanted to make sure that non-DMA members also gave households an option to opt out (most likely by encouraging them to respect 'no junk mail' signs, as was suggested in Defra's press release).

Garrick added it was important to agree a statement for when the Daily Mail comes calling. In her reply, Defra's press officer objected that the DMA's claim was very misleading and bluntly suggested they could simply tell the Daily Mail that they are committed to delivering the website and that they will do so shortly. In response, Garrick suggested a new statement on 4th May:

The new user-friendly website that enables householders to opt out of receiving unwanted advertising mail has been developed. Agreement is now being reached with other organisations representing industries that produce and distribute other kinds of printed materials to households to commit them to also support the scheme. Their support will make the opt out (sic) service even more effective than was first expected. The website will go live as soon as possible.

It is not difficult to see the compromise. The DMA dropped its claim that opt-out scheme would only be launched if and when other industry bodies had been engaged and they no longer blamed Defra for the delay. At the same time they made the involvement of other industry bodies part of the deal; the statement implies that the website would be launched only if a bunch of other industry representatives join the party (to make the opt out service even more effective than was first expected). And, the sting in the tail was that the DMA removed the timetable; as soon as possible should be translated as "whenever the unmentioned other organisations are on board" — and that could take a very long time indeed. Surprisingly, Defra's press officer accepted the compromise. In effect, Defra agreed that the opt-out scheme wouldn't be launched until they managed to convince other paper wasters to play their part.

Long grass

The row killed off both the Door-Drop Preference Service and the voluntary producer responsibility deal. I regularly asked Defra if any progress had been made and only ever got canned responses; they insisted the opt-out scheme hadn't been kicked into the long grass, even though it was obvious that was exactly what had happened. Subsequent Freedom of Information requests, for any correspondence between Defra and the DMA and the responsibility deal in general, invariably got the reply that the information I asked for didn't exist. That included Freedom of Information requests I had submitted to the Scottish and Welsh government — apparently, they didn't have any information about the opt-out scheme, even though they were members of the steering committee. WRAP, the charity that was also part of the committee, refused to even confirm whether or not the committee still existed (they kept referring me to the DMA, even though they knew they refused to talk with me).

Clearly, the DMA and Defra were no longer on talking terms and the other parties involved in the agreement made no attempt to find a solution. Eventually, in 2015, I got a response from the Under Secretary for the Environment and Rural Affairs, which confirmed the opt-out scheme was death and buried. The government felt that self-regulation was working quite well and that there was no need for a new opt-out website for unaddressed mail. What had been an out-dated system in 2011 was suddenly good enough. Against all odds, the Door-to-Door Opt-Out and the Your Choice Dummy Scheme survived.

The coroner's verdict

In retrospect, it is easy to see the cause of the opt-out scheme's premature death. The DMA's reservations about the scheme were never properly addressed and the agreement's governance was hopelessly weak.

As I mentioned earlier, I personally reckon the DMA's concerns were hypocritical. If they feel that opt-out schemes for unaddressed mail give an unfair advantage to unregulated distributors then they should have made the case for an alternative solution, such as a sticker scheme. That said, the industry's concern was acknowledged in the agreement. And, it is also fair to say that Defra did next to nothing to engage with other parts of the industry. Defra's policy advisor had a single meeting with one of these other parts — in January 2012 he met with the Professional Publishers Association about the issue of leaflets in magazines and the need to improve targeting. An email about the meeting stated that it wasn't an issue that was on their radar and that they knew very little about current industry practice. The only positive outcome of the meeting was that they would do a bit of digging to see what can be done. Nothing happened after that.

And, there was no mechanism to resolve the row between the DMA and Defra. The steering group never met, and the Scottish and Welsh government were involved on paper only. I have no idea why WRAP was involved, as they also didn't show the slightest interest in the agreement. From late-2012 onwards, the co-operation between the parties was limited to fending of awkward questions.

What the opt-out website would have looked like

To round off this chapter we can have a look at what might have been. The response to the original Freedom of Information request included screenshots of the opt-out website. The documents were all black and white scans and some of the text was difficult to decypher, so I have reproduced the screenshots to make everything legible. The service would have been known as the Door-Drop Preference Service and the home page would have looked like this:

The design was largely copied and pasted from the MPS website. Both the slogan (helping you to receive the unaddressed mail your want!) and the introduction text were inspired by the MPS website as well. However, the first two paragraphs of the DPS website are somewhat confused. The copy suggests the DPS was created because many people are happy to hear from companies. Obviously, the whole point of the DPS was to give people an easy option to not hear from companies.

The registration process involved five steps. Throughout the process, the website would warn you that you might not receive important information if you opt out. The original agreement suggested that the scare tactics deployed by the Door-to-Door Opt-Out and Your Choice would be dropped but that is not what the DMA had in mind. By opting out, you could miss out on public consultations such as information on road closures, planning and bin collections.

Defra didn't object to these scare tactics, even though one of the reasons why the Door-to-Door Opt-Out and Your Choice had such abysmal registration rates was because people were worried about the consequences of opting out. In this chapter's introduction, I mentioned the DMA report which revealed that only 1,600 households had registered with Your Choice by 2009. That same report notes that about half the households requesting an opt-out form don't register once they realise the implications of opting out. The new opt-out service was supposed to be sympathetic and effective.

Speaking of a "sympathetic and effective" service, the DPS would become fully effective after a whopping three months and households would need to re-register every two years. According to the Frequently Asked Questions, the reason is that companies prepare unaddresssed mail-outs months in advance. Of course, there is no logical reason why a leaflet that has already been prepared should be delivered to households that have recently opted out.