Postal delivery in the Netherlands is under pressure and it appears that no stop is being put to the erosion of service provision.
PostNL, once the proud national postal service, announced that business mail will no longer be guaranteed to be delivered within 2025 hours from 24. According to the company, this decision is necessary to keep the costs of mail delivery manageable, but it puts serious pressure on the reliability of the service. The company also wants to deliver other types of mail later, but this requires a change in the law. PostNL has previously approached the government for financial support to keep mail affordable and is now doing so again.
What is particularly incomprehensible is that PostNL vehicles tear through the same streets multiple times a day to deliver packages, while the same company is unable to deliver letters and legal documents in accordance with the law. It seems to be a trend: the service is visibly declining, but little is being done to stop this. Both citizens and law firms are at their wits' end, while the government looks on.
registered mail
Annemarie Posset, lawyer at Uilenburg Advocaten, recently raised the alarm via social media. She said she went to pick up a registered shipment at her regular parcel point, but to her surprise, there was a whole pile of registered mail in front of her office. “No note in our mailbox and nothing visible in the app. We work with legal deadlines and must be able to rely 100% on the service provided by PostNL. However, it falls seriously short. Are there more people who experience this?” Posset is not the only one struggling with these kinds of problems.
A poignant example is the mourning mail that was simply delivered too late. The notification of a death was left at a post office and did not reach the family in time. This type of mail, which one would expect to be treated with the highest priority, is left at a post office without the recipients being aware of it.
bailiff
The situation has become so bad that many companies no longer trust PostNL for important mail. Legal documents are increasingly being delivered by bailiffs, because the legal value of registered mail can no longer be guaranteed. Many law firms report that registered mail regularly does not arrive, or that no mention is made of a shipment that is at a collection point. “As a result, I paid the court fee too late in one of my cases,” reports one lawyer. “I have already filed two formal complaints with PostNL, but no response has been received.”
These malpractices show that PostNL is moving further and further away from the core values that the company once had: reliability and safety of mail delivery. It is time that stricter requirements are imposed on how registered mail is handled, because if even legal documents are handled in this way, the legal value of registered mail is almost non-existent.
What makes it worse is that deliverers sometimes sign for receipt themselves and leave the mail item with a neighbor, without informing the addressee. The legal value of a registered item has been completely eroded. Confidence in the reliability of PostNL has been lost, and it is clear that proof of sending is no longer equivalent to proof of receipt.
no incidents
The problem is that the consumer, whether it is a private individual or a company, is left out in the cold. PostNL's service has been deteriorating for years, but there seems to be no end to the abuses. The company continues to claim that these are incidents, but the reality is that this has become a structural problem. Postal items that disappear, registered letters that are not delivered and even legal mail that is on the road for weeks or simply never arrives - this is no longer an exception.
It is therefore not surprising that many are wondering whether it is not time to take drastic measures. Perhaps the time has come to send the entire management of PostNL home and reorganize the company from top to bottom. Because despite the privatization of the postal service, in which market forces should ensure better and more efficient services, it is now all about profit. The quality of postal delivery is increasingly becoming a neglected child.
profit margins
The core of the problem does not lie with the employees of PostNL, who undoubtedly do their work with passion, but with the way the company is managed. The focus is now entirely on cost savings and profit margins, at the expense of the reliability of the service. The legal value of registered mail has now disappeared in practice, and this leads to a wave of complaints and frustrations among consumers and companies.
Adjusting the legislation to accommodate PostNL would be a major mistake. On the contrary, the postal company must strictly adhere to the rules as laid down in the Postal Act 2009. This law is there for a reason: it guarantees that citizens and companies in the Netherlands can count on reliable and timely mail delivery. PostNL has a legal obligation to provide that service, and the continued scaling down of that service in the interest of cost savings is not only unacceptable, but also a direct violation of those obligations.
It is time for the government to intervene, because postal delivery was once a government task with a high social importance. The secrecy of letters, the certainty that important documents are delivered on time and safely – these are right-wing that should not be lost in the drive for profit. PostNL shows time and again that they cannot handle the responsibility, and it is time for change.
Postal Act 2009
PostNL has been appointed by the Dutch government to provide a basic package of postal services. This responsibility is laid down in the Postal Act 2009, which sets specific requirements for the services provided by the postal company. Among other things, this law stipulates that there must be sufficient public mailboxes and postal service points spread across the country. In addition, PostNL is required to empty mailboxes and deliver mail five days a week. For mourning mail and medical mail, there is even a requirement of six days a week. Furthermore, there is a requirement that at least 95% of letters are delivered the next day, which should provide a guarantee for timely delivery of mail.
