Consumer Focus Labs

Describe your idea: Better Post is a web service for people in the UK to find out if postal mail for them is still getting sent to the places they used to live, and for the people now living there to find out who to forward it to.

I propose a highly usable, free website which does the following:1. Matches past and current residents of any address in the UK property; then, 2. Connects them together, safely, so they can sort out the post. A current resident could input the addressee’s surname and initial, and connect it with the house number, street and postcode, and then associate their email with that specific entry. Someone wanting to know if there was mail at an address would search Better Post using the same five variables. Where there was a match, Better Post would inform both parties, and provide a hosted method for them to communicate, exchange emails or other social
networking identities.

What problem does it solve?: When moving home, most people do their best to call friends and organisations who they know send them mail, to let them know their new postal address. They sometimes leave a forwarding address, or pay Royal Mail to set up a postal redirect for a few months post-move. This doesn’t work. People are forgetful or have no idea who is sending them mail, and companies are still rubbish at updating details. In every property I have ever lived or owned, the Royal Mail regularly
posts letters for many different previous residents, former tenants and owners. It’s not all junk mail
either: I’ve wrongly received letters from out of touch relatives, old memberships and subscriptions, and creditors. This is sometimes years after people have moved (and then moved again, rendering their forwarding address useless).

So what do we do about this? Currently, the sole option available to me as a resident is to scrawl “return to sender” or “not known at this address on it”, pop it back in a postbox, and hope the sender bothers to update their records. Done? No, the mail just keeps coming. Return to Sender doesn’t solve the real problem: the addressee isn’t informed that somebody is sending them mail, and the actual recipient is stuck. When/if I move house again, I have to start the whole process again. A better way is to connect current and former residents somehow, and let them work out the problem together: a citizen-led solution.

There is no comparable site anywhere in the world. The Royal Mail post forwarding and mail redirect services are the nearest competitor. These cost money and demonstrates their ineffectiveness every time you move house. They’re not appropriate solutions for mobile, tech-savvy populations who don’t want to write a letter to Royal Mail to ask for other letters to be stopped. They also don’t solve the root problem: the addressee needs to know they have mail. There are many services like the Mail Preference Service, which help consumers get off direct marketing lists. These, however, don’t help the unintended recipients of direct mail for other people: I can’t unsubscribe someone else, and no mechanism exists for me to let an address know I am recieving their junkmail, and that they should do something about it.