On 31 August 2021, we issued our decision document setting out our decisions on proposals we made as part of the simplification of the Access Letters Contract (ALC) consultation.

One of the decisions pertained to the simplification of container label requirements, and specifically making the requirement for customers to present the indicator ‘Zonal’ on the Royal Mail defined information field of the container label optional.

Since publication of the decision, and the subsequent contract change notice issued on 30 November 2021, we have identified an unforeseen challenge with enabling removal of the zonal option identification from the labels ??" namely, the zonal indicator is used by our sampling team to distinguish between national and zonal price plan mailings, which in turn feeds in to the process for contract monitoring, determining the price plan benchmarks, as well as the zonal costing model.

It is important we retain the requirement for customers to present the zonal option identification on container labels to avoid the above process being adversely impacted, therefore we are revoking the decision to make this optional from 16 June 2022. Instead, the zonal option identification will continue to be a mandatory field on the Royal Mail defined information section of container labels.

All other decisions relating to label simplification, as published in our decision document, will remain.

User Guide amendment number 065 effects the above change.