Function

Postcomm's job is to make sure licensed postal operators - including Royal Mail - meet the needs of their customers throughout the UK.

Postcomm do this by:

·         Protecting the universal service - The universal service means that anyone in the UK can post letters and parcels to any other part of the country at the same affordable rates. And it guarantees daily delivery of mail for every UK household and business, six days a week, and one collection per day, every day except Sunday;

·         Licensing postal operators - Postal operators dealing with mail costing less than £1 to deliver and weighing less than 350 grams must have a licence from Postcomm;

·         Introducing competition into mail services - Postcomm opened the UK mail market to competition for bulk mail services (postings of 4,000 items or more) in 2003, and followed that with full market opening on 1 January 2006;

·         Regulating Royal Mail - With more than 95% of the letters market, Royal Mail is the dominant provider of mail services in the UK and will probably remain so for years to come. In order to protect customers and prevent the company from taking unfair advantage of its dominant position, Postcomm regulate Royal Mail's quality of service and its prices.

·         Advising the Government on the Post Office network - Postcomm doesn't regulate post offices or make decision about closures, but we do advise the Department of Trade and Industry on what's happening within the network.

Discussion with them indicated that those that they do not mandate any level of information security for those that they regulate they leave it to the organisation themselves to determine this on a risk assessment basis