ICO consultation on new electronic mail marketing rules for charities

We’re consulting on our approach to the charitable purpose soft opt-in. 

This new way for charities to send electronic mail marketing has been added to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 but is not yet in force.

The information is primarily aimed at charities, but we welcome input and feedback from anybody with an interest in this topic. 

Your responses to our consultation will help us update the relevant sections of our existing guidance to reflect the change. You can respond to the consultation via our survey on Citizen Space.

We welcome your feedback to the questions set out in this survey. They’re split into the following sections: 

• Section 1: About you.
• Section 2: About your charity.
• Section 3: About your organisation.
• Section 4: Questions about our consultation.
• Section 5: Costs and benefits.
• Section 6: Final comments.

The consultation will remain open until 23:59(GMT) on Thursday 27 November 2025. We may not consider responses received after this deadline.

Privacy statement

For this consultation, we may publish in full the responses we receive from organisations or a summary of the responses. If we do publish any responses, we will remove email addresses and telephone numbers from them. Please do not share any information in your response that you would not be happy for us to make publicly available.

Should we receive an FOI request for your response, we will always seek to consult with you for your views on the disclosure of this information before we make a decision. For more information about what we do with personal information, please see our privacy notice and the section on responding to our consultations and surveys.

Please note that we are using the platform Citizen Space to gather this information on our behalf. A UK supplier, Delib, provides Citizen Space. For more information, see Delib’s privacy policy.