I received a response within two days, which I don't think had ever happened before. Sadly, the response only answers the second question; all the other answers are ambiguous.
The answer to my third question is truly stunning. The reason why Royal Mail doesn't send people a reminder before a registration expires is that sending such letters would be too expensive. In effect Royal Mail is saying that sending letters is nowadays prohibitively expensive – even though they'd be paying themselves…
From: S Caldicott (Royal Mail)
To: Stop Junk Mail
Subject: Royal Mail Opt out Service
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2015 09:12:16 +0000
Dear Mr R,
Thank you for your email dated 23rd June, regarding your enquiries concerning the Royal Mail Opt Out service. I have answered your queries below for you.
#1 – Election material and important information
The auto-reply text ask people to consider the following statement:
Some of the items that we deliver may contain important information issued by local and central Government departments, for example materials relating to elections. Because we cannot legally separate these items from the others we deliver – such as advertising offers or leaflets – you will not receive these if you choose to opt out.
However, on the page with information about opting out on your website you state:
Opting out from Royal Mail Door to Door stops all unaddressed items from being delivered by us (although we do work with Government to get a message to every UK address in exceptional circumstances). Election material is not delivered by the Door to Door service and is therefore not affected by this opt out.
My understanding is that registering with your opt-out scheme will stop all unaddressed mail distributed by your company with two exceptions:
- Unaddressed election communications (that is, the one-off free door-drops to which candidates standing for MP are entitled to).
- Unaddressed items which local or central government want to be delivered to every address. An example of such an item is the "swine flu" leaflet produced by the Department of Health in 2009.
Could you confirm if this is correct please?
In response to the above query, you are correct, we are unable to separate the unaddressed items, which is why if you register to be Opted Out, all unaddressed items will be stopped, however, on occasions with regards to important information being sent out to everybody by the Local and Central Government departments items will still be sent regardless of any current Opt Out that may be running and these will be messages with information for things such as the Bird Flu and Swine Flu epidemics.
#2 – When do registrations start?
Registrations with your scheme expire after two years and you advise that households who wish to remain opted out should re-register before the two years are up. Could you confirm if households are registered from the date the form was signed, or whether you use another start date (for instance, the date the opt-out request was processed)?
The registration will start from the day in which we actually register your address as being opted out and will then run for two years from this date. The covering letter that we send to you with the Opt Out form advises you of this and also advised you that the request will be implemented within six weeks, however, it is usually a lot quicker than this.
#3 – Reminders
You don't send households a letter / e-mail to confirm that their opt-out request has been processed, nor do send households a reminder before a registration expires. I genuinely don't understand why this is. In particular the reminder would be really helpful as it's easy to forget to re-register after (roughly) 22 months. I appreciate that you want to check if a household still wants to be using your opt-out scheme (the household might have moved) but I don't understand why the assumption is made that households that don't re-register want to opt in again; it gives the impression that you don't want households to opt out. Or, to put it differently, I don't know of any business that simply assumes that clients no longer want to do business with them after a certain period of time. Normally, at least one reminder is sent.
The Opt Out service is a totally free service and we even provide you with a freepost address with which to return your completed form. As we have a high number of households that register with Royal Mail to be opted out, if we were then to send out confirmation letters and reminder letters this would then incur a high cost which Royal Mail would need to recoup, which would mean we would then need to actually make a charge for the service, which we do not want to do, as we want to keep the service free.
#4 – Verifying addresses
Your website states that when you will send an opt-out form to the address of the person who requested the form and that this is done to verify that those resident at the address have requested the opt out
. Am I correct that this statement is wrong? When I sent an e-mail to optout@royalmail.com I get the form attached to an auto-reply message. And if so, is it correct that you don't verify that the household did request to be opted out? (Obviously, this question is related to my question about sending people a confirmation letter, which in effect would prevent people can register random households).
When we receive a telephone call from a resident who wishes to be Opted Out we send out the Letter and form and request that the form be signed and returned, in order to verify that this particular resident wishes to be opted out. If someone makes a request via email, we do not simply take the email as the request but still send out the letter and form so that we are still able to verify that the person actually wants to be opted out.
There are certain occasions where we will take a request over the phone and this is when there are extenuating circumstances such as a person being registered blind or when there has been a death in the family.
#5 – Identifying door-to-door items
Would you agree that it's difficult for households to know whether or not an unaddressed mail item was distributed by your company? Last week I got two leaflets: one from a company called 'Barracudas' and another from a company called 'Hunters'. If I were registered with your opt-out scheme, how would I know whether or not those items should have been prevented?
The unaddressed items are delivered by the postman with the normal addressed mail, so if you are registered as being opted out and still receive the unaddressed items along with items of normal mail this is a good indication that the items have been delivered by Royal Mail, however on the odd occasion that you have had unaddressed items delivered and have not had any normal addressed mail then you can contact the Customer Services Team on 01865 796 988 in order to check to see if these are items that have been delivered erroneously by Royal Mail.
Royal Mail only delivers 25% of unaddressed items, therefore opting out of Royal Mail Door to Door deliveries will not eliminate the majority of items that you currently receive through your letterbox as there are other companies who deliver leaflets to whom this opt out will not apply.
I do hope that I have now covered all of the concerns that you have raised Mr R, however, if I can be of any further assistance then please do not hesitate to contact me and I will be happy to assist you.
Yours sincerely
S Caldicott
Advanced Customer Advisor
Royal Mail – Multichannel Customer Experience
Kingsmead House, Oxpens Road, Oxford, OX1 1AA