What you are allowed to post, and to whom

The short answer

You may write to someone you have never met, about their building project, without asking them first. The reason is that the consent rule for unsolicited marketing is a rule about email, texts and phone calls. A letter is governed by data protection law instead, and that asks a different question: do you have a reason the law recognises, and have you told the person what you are doing?

That is the whole of the difference, and it is why post is still open to a one-van firm when email is not.

Why post is not email

The consent requirement for unsolicited marketing sits in the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, and the words it uses are by means of electronic mail. Texts and recorded calls are in the same place. Paper is not.

The Information Commissioner's Office — the regulator — says it in one sentence:

If you're sending direct marketing to people by post, PECR marketing rules don't apply. But you still must comply with data protection law.

So the question is never did they agree to this? It is what is my reason, and have I been straight with them about it?

The reason you will be relying on

Data protection law lists the reasons you are allowed to hold somebody's details. The one that fits a marketing letter is called legitimate interests, and it works by weighing: your interest in finding work against the recipient's interest in being left alone. You are expected to have done that weighing, to be able to show it, and to take the recipient's side of it seriously.

Two things make that weighing easier for a letter about a planning application than for almost any other cold approach. The details were published by the council because the law requires the register to be public. And the person has told the world, in writing, that they intend to build something — so a letter about building work is not arriving out of nowhere.

Neither of those is a free pass. They are the facts that make the balance come out your way, and they are the facts you would point at if anybody asked. Ours is written down and published: why we are allowed to write to you.

What the law makes you do

4 things, and the first three fit on one sheet of paper.

1. Say who sent it and where you got the address

   Somebody who did not hand you their details is entitled to be told the name of the business holding them, what it is doing with them, and which source they came from — and a public register counts as a source you have to name. The letter itself is the first and usually the only chance you get to say it.

   UK GDPR Article 14(1)(a), 14(2)(f) and 14(3)(b) — legislation.gov.uk, read 20 October 2026

2. Put the way to stop the letters on the letter

   The right to object to marketing has to be brought to the reader's attention "explicitly" and "presented clearly and separately from any other information". A line in a privacy policy on a website does not do it; a sentence on the page, set apart from the sales copy, does.

   UK GDPR Article 21(4) — legislation.gov.uk, read 20 October 2026

3. Stop when they ask, and keep stopping

   An objection to direct marketing is not a request you weigh up: once it is made, "the personal data shall no longer be processed for such purposes". That means the address has to go on a list you check before the next mailing, not just out of this one.

   UK GDPR Article 21(2) and 21(3) — legislation.gov.uk, read 20 October 2026

4. Screen the list against suppression files first

   This one is advertising rules rather than data protection, and it is easy to miss because it sits somewhere else entirely: the advertising code requires that a database has been run against the relevant suppression files before it is used. The Mailing Preference Service, run by the Direct Marketing Association, is the consumer file for addressed post.

   CAP Code rule 10.10 — Committee of Advertising Practice, read 20 October 2026

What the notice has to say

There is no prescribed wording, which is why it is worth seeing one that has been through the exercise. This is the sentence printed at the foot of every letter this service posts, composed by the system that posts it:

To stop letters like this, email hello@justgranted.co.uk. Your address is from your council's planning register; posted by Just Granted (Blueworkz Ltd). justgranted.co.uk/privacy

It does four jobs in the one line it is given: it names the business, it says where the address came from, it points at the full privacy notice, and it gives one route to stop. A subscriber writes the letter above it and cannot edit or remove it.

Three places the rules bite hardest

1. An objection is not a line through this mailing. Once somebody objects, their details may no longer be used for marketing at all — so the address has to go onto a list you check before the next run, and stay there. Taking them out of the current batch and buying the same list again in March is the failure the rule is written to catch.
2. Suppression screening is an advertising rule, not a data protection one. It is enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority against UK advertisers whether or not they belong to any trade body, and it lives in the advertising code rather than anywhere a data protection checklist would look.
3. Your reason does not travel to another channel. Having a sound basis for a letter does not let you email, text or ring the same person: those are back under the consent rule. We post and do nothing else to an applicant — no email, no texts, no calls — which is also the single strongest point in our own weighing.

What this service does about it

Here is what the system does about them. Each one is enforced in code rather than promised, which is the only version of compliance that survives a busy week.

• The notice is printed by the sending system, not by a template a subscriber can edit. There is one wording and it is on every format.
• 1 letter per application, per business. A second one is refused by the database, not by somebody remembering.
• One objection stops every business using the service. An entry on the opt-out register is not attached to whoever's letter prompted it, so an applicant who objects once does not have to object again — and the register is checked twice, once when the letter is composed and again at the moment it is handed to the printer.
• Post only, to applicants. No marketing email, no texts and no telephone calls, ever — enforced by there being no such feature.

What this page does not answer

Whether your letter works is a different question, and it has numbers behind it: the published response rates are on their own page with the industry body's release linked. What a letter costs to send is on what planning leads cost.

And the rules above are the general ones. Business-to-business post, mail to a company rather than a person, and anything involving a list you bought from somebody else all carry extra questions this page does not take on.