Guidance for (Acting) Returning Officers administering a UK Parliamentary election in Great Britain

You may choose to manage the supply of your postal vote packs to a delivery partner directly or have this managed by your print supplier. You may use Royal Mail or any other commercial delivery firm for the delivery of postal votes. You can find more information in our guidance: Working with mail delivery partners.

Options for delivery

If you are using Royal Mail to deliver your postal votes, you should put in place arrangements for the relevant licenses and Business Reply numbers as soon as possible and confirm that your proposed stationery meets their specifications in order to avoid any potential delays at the time when your postal ballot packs are due to be distributed to electors. If you are using a commercial delivery firm, you should make similar arrangements as appropriate.

Your contingency planning should address how you would issue and receive any returned postal ballot packs in the event that Royal Mail or the commercial delivery firm you have contracted are unable to deliver the postal ballot packs, for example, due to industrial action.

If you are using Royal Mail to deliver your postal votes, you should ensure that you have an up-to-date copy of Royal Mail’s best practice guidance on postal voting, Managing Postal Voting.

Quality assuring the despatch process

You should make arrangements for the secure transfer of the postal ballot packs from your printer to Royal Mail or your chosen delivery firm. You should ensure that a clear procedure and audit trail is in place for transferring postal ballot packs.

You must count the total number of outgoing envelopes and arrange delivery of the envelopes to your delivery contractor along with a receipt showing the total number of postal ballot packs in that batch.1 This receipt should be endorsed by Royal Mail or your delivery firm to acknowledge that they have received the batch prior to despatch.

If your printing supplier is despatching materials to electors on your behalf, it is important that you continue to liaise with them once final sign-off of all printed and filled material is completed and it is ready for despatch.

You should ensure that you get confirmation from your print supplier once despatch has begun, confirmation of how many packs have been or will be despatched per day and an update on how long it will take for the despatch to be completed.

You should ask your print supplier for a copy of the postal dockets for each despatch for adding to your formal audit trail of the process. These dockets should detail the number of items despatched per day, and confirm the postal services used. Photos/scanned images of the dockets will suffice for these purposes. 

If you have agreed with your print supplier that down stream access (DSA) providers will be used as part of the despatch and delivery process, you should get updates from your delivery contractor on the progress of the delivery throughout.

You should have in place a mechanism for monitoring the delivery of postal ballot packs, with a view to ensuring that they have been delivered across the whole of the constituency and to agreed timeframes.
 
All of the measures above will help to identify possible issues that may have arisen with regards to despatch, feed into any subsequent evaluation of contractor performance, and enable you to provide information to voters on dates that they should expect to receive material through your social media channels and call centres as appropriate.

Quality assurance measures for monitoring delivery

If possible, you should have arrangements in place to track deliveries in order to assist with responding to any enquiries from electors regarding the delivery of their postal ballot pack. You should also ensure you monitor the level of queries from electors being received through all channels as this will help to highlight any issues being experienced with the delivery of materials in practice.

You should monitor any unusually low returns of completed postal ballots by polling districts, as that may be an indication of delivery issues.

You should also ensure that you have clear methods of communication to enable any issues or queries to be addressed quickly. You can find more information on quality assurance in our guidance on managing contractors.