1. Proposer: Colette Baldwin – E.ON Panel Date: 21 st August 2014 0479A: Mod Title: Inclusion of email as a valid UNC communication

2. Why change? Email has superseded fax as a more efficient and common form of business communication but remains disallowed as an official form of UNC communication, despite all relevant parties using it across other aspects of their business. Where formal communication grants rights or imposes obligations on parties, the deemed sending/receipt for email communication is not sufficient to bind the parties contractually and it is important that the network code reflects the necessary safeguards needed to ensure that there is the “meeting of minds” in the evolution of that contractual relationship between the parties. The rules need to reflect the ability of the parties to communicate whilst recognising that there are some technical challenges that interrupt the instantaneous communication that emails offer, for example some email systems are set up such that they automatically return emails if they detect what they believe to be a virus/Trojan horse/spyware.

3. Options The original proposals are in our opinion deficient in not addressing the issues of robust business rules for managing successful communication. If a postal address has a mistake within it, very often the rest of the address can be used to sense check where it should be delivered to, combinations of other elements can make up for the erroneous element…for example the street address may be “avenue” rather than “road”, but the inclusion of the (correct) post-code may improve the likelihood of successful delivery to the intended recipient even if other parts of the address are incorrect. A homeowner who receives a letter they believe is incorrectly addressed may put it back in the mail with the suggested correction - particularly if it’s a common error in the address…”Road” not “Avenue”, and the carrier will attempt redelivery, however if an email address is incorrectly recorded or incorrectly set up by the sender, non-delivery notices or “bounce backs” may occur, however the email may just be delivered to someone else - totally unrelated and that unintended recipient is under no obligation to reject it, or contact anyone to advise them of the sender’s mistake. So business rules on address management and non delivery notices will ensure successful communication is achieved in the most efficient way. In the electricity mods which NGN’s mod was based on, the code defined exceptions to the use of email communications which the original UNC mod doesn’t consider.

4. Solution Determine what can be communicated by email and how that is agreed How consent to receive and send email communication is established and maintained Determining whether communication has been achieved and setting out obligations to manage “Non-delivery” notices How UK Link manages changes to Appendix 5B

5. Recommended Steps The Proposer recommends that this modification should be:  Not subject to self-governance - we disagree that the original modification meets the criteria for Self Governance as we believe it could have a material impact on contractual relationships if important communication provisions are not managed robustly and therefore it could impact competition.  Should be sent to the existing 479 workgroup to develop the modification for 3 months.