Our transparency agenda

Royal Mail Group is committed to being more responsive, open and transparent with its stakeholders.

Royal Mail and Post Office represent two out of the top three most highly regarded brands in the UK.(1).

This is a great advantage to us. The strength of our brands derives from how we serve our customers and our interaction with other stakeholders. We are committed to being more responsive, open and transparent with our customers. We aim to enhance our transparency reporting in 2012.

Freedom of Information requests

We receive a significant number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests each year. These requests cover a wide range of issues. We receive them from a broad spectrum of people, including members of the public, the media and elected representatives. Some of these requests can be answered quickly but some need to be considered carefully under the terms of the legislation.

In the last year, 590 requests were referred to our central FOI team. Of those, 267 requests were answered in full and a further 116 requests were answered in part. There were 137 requests where the information requested was not provided because, for example, it would damage commercial interests or breach principles of the Data Protection Act. In another 70 cases, the information requested was not held by us.

Returned letters

The overwhelming majority of all items we handle are delivered safely to the correct address. A very modest proportion of the items we handle are undeliverable for a variety of different reasons outside of our control. For example, items are not always able to be delivered if addresses are incomplete, the recipient has moved, or there is no return address. In these circumstances, letters and packets are returned to the National Return Letter Centre in Belfast.

We try very hard to ascertain the correct address and deliver the item. If that is not possible, we will seek to return it to the sender free of charge. Our National Return Letter Centre employs 160 fulltime people dedicated to trying to return items.

The number of items processed in 2010-11 by the Centre was 19.6 million. That should be set against the 15.9bn of items we delivered this year.

The mail which cannot be delivered or returned is stored for up to four months. If an item is not claimed, it is put out to auction. All the proceeds, minus a market rate commission for the auction house, are used to partially pay the considerable cost involved in seeking to reunite customers with their items.

The annual income from items sold at auction by the National Return Letter Centre for 2010-11 was £933,255. This income represents a modest contribution to the annual cost of more than £4m of providing this free service.

Exceptions to our delivery and collection service

The decision to suspend the delivery of mail is never taken lightly. Royal Mail’s purpose is to process and deliver mail and we are extremely proud to deliver mail to almost 29 million addresses across the UK, six days a week.

However, we are not always able to deliver or collect mail as we would like to. At the time of the Exceptions Annual Review in October 2010 there were 2,985 national Universal Service delivery exceptions in the UK. This represents 0.01% of the total number of addresses that we deliver to. The exceptions are where our postmen and women have difficulty gaining access or there is a long-term health and safety risk. There were also 414 short-term delivery  exceptions, which have been in place for more than 12 months in October 2010. These are mainly due to dangerous dogs in gardens.

In 2010/11, there were 2,180 long-term Universal Service collection exceptions across the UK. This represents 1.7% of the total number of points that we collect from. These exceptions can be caused by difficulties in accessing post boxes. There were also 155 short-term collection exceptions of more than four months. These were caused by road or building works, limiting access to post boxes. All of these exceptions are reported to our regulator on a regular basis.

(1) MORI Corporate Image Survey Autumn 2011.