Service of statutory notices by email policy

There are circumstances in which our legislation requires us to issue statutory notices or notifications (‘notices’) to our registrants (for example, removal of a registrant from the register, refusal to retain or restore a registrant on/to the register, or notice of an interim order hearing) or applicants seeking initial registration or to restore to the register. We are committed to doing this in a way that is fair to registrants/individuals and in line with the requirements of our legislation.

We recognised that there may be additional risks in sending notices by email and so we drafted a policy setting out the safeguards that we will apply to ensure fairness to our registrants and applicants seeking initial registration or restoration.

We consulted on a draft policy for 12 weeks from 30 June to 22 September 2021. We asked respondents about the content of the policy, whether there was anything unclear or missing, where there were any aspects of the policy that could discriminate against or have positive impacts on stakeholders with specific characteristics, and whether there were any other impacts of the policy.

We received ten written consultation responses from a range of stakeholders including optical representative organisations and our registrants.

Key findings from the consultation were:

• 75% agreed or strongly agreed with the content of the policy;
• 62.5% felt that there was something unclear or missing in the policy;
• 62.5% did not think there were any aspects of the policy that could discriminate against stakeholders with specific characteristics;
• 25% thought there were aspects of the policy that could have positive impacts on stakeholders with specific characteristics; and
• 37.5% told us that there were other impacts of the policy that they would like to tell us about.

Overall, there was support for the amended policy from our stakeholders, with suggestions for additions and amendments, particularly from the professional/representative and defence bodies.

On the basis of feedback received during the consultation we made the following amendments to the policy:

• we amended the policy to ensure it is clear that we will comply with section 23A(3) of the Opticians Act 1989 when implementing The General Optical Council (Committee Constitution, Registration and Fitness to Practise) (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Rules 2020;
• we clarified when we will implement the policy on the MyGOC database;
• we updated the consent clause to make it clear:
  • which email address registrants are consenting to and what to do if they wish to change their email address; and
  • that if they do not consent, they will continue to receive other communications except statutory notices by email;
• we clarified that the policy does not apply to our communications with other participants in the fitness to practise process (for example, complainants or witnesses) as this is outside its scope;
• we gave examples of routine fitness to practise correspondence and what reasonable attempts the Fitness to Practise team will make in checking that a notice has been received;
• we made it clear that if we are not satisfied that notice of a hearing sent by email has been received by the individual/registrant, we will send the notice by first class post and, subject to our overriding duty of public protection, we will ensure there is sufficient time for the individual/registrant to prepare in line with statutory timescales;
• we clarified the attempts we will make to contact someone after sending a notice of failure to apply for renewal to anyone who has not renewed their registration in advance of the renewal deadline;
• we made it clear that we will also serve notice by post if we are not satisfied that a registrant is aware of their removal from the register; and
• we amended the paragraph on reasonable adjustments to make it clear that where we receive information that a registrant who has previously consented to receive notices by email may find it difficult to process them in this way (for example, because of a health condition), we will endeavour to meet the needs of the registrant and will consider all reasonable adjustments on a case by case basis.

Further detail about the amendments and the areas we considered are in our GOC response to the consultation located in the 'files' section below (see pages 13-16 for the conclusions). An updated impact assessment is also available.

We published the policy on our website on 20 December 2021: https://optical.org/en/publications/service-of-notices-by-email-policy/