CF Labs

The Royal Mail provides a major public service across the UK – it handles millions of items of mail every day. Its operating licence requires it to publish a number of data sets on its performance on a regular basis. For example, it is required to publish information on its delivery targets (quality of service) every three months. It also has to publish details of the complaints it receives and the compensation it pays out every year.

As the statutory consumer watchdog for postal services, it is the responsibility of Consumer Focus to scrutinise this data and help the public hold the Royal Mail to account.

Recently, we’ve been working with our policy team in Consumer Focus Wales to see how we can improve the transparency and visibility of the information we receive from the Royal Mail. Today we are pleased to launch the Wales Mail Report – a tool to make this data available to the public in an easily digestible form.

The Wales Mail Report takes the quality of service and complaints data from numerous large PDF documents and presents it in HTML tables with interactive charts. We’ve broken the data down by postcode area so you can see how well the Royal Mail is performing in your area. We’ll also be updating the data every time new figures are published.

Best of all – we’ve made everything available in open formats. You can download all the information in CSV and JSON formats under the Open Government Licence.

Although the tool only covers the postcode areas in Wales at the moment, we hope to be able to do the same for other parts of the UK over the next few months.

Let us know what you think and if you re-use the data we’d love to see what you’ve been able to do.