Postal delivery company PostNL has been fined €2m by consumer watchdog Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM) for failing to deliver mail on time in 2019.

According to the sector norm, an average of 95% of the letters posted in the Netherlands have to be delivered on the following delivery day. PostNL did not manage more than 94.34%.

PostNL is blaming network problems at postal company Sandd which it was in the proces of taking over in 2019. In order to solve this, PostNL used its own network to deliver accumulated mail and this caused the delays, the company said.

However, the ACM said PostNL had simply failed to act efficiently in the face of the problems it knew would arise with the takeover. Moreover, delivery results were already under pressure at PostNL before the takeover, the watchdog said.

PostNL did perform according to the norm for medical mail and funeral cards while also scoring the required 95% for having complete postal services available to everyone with a range of five kilometres. In 2019 99.7% of the population had access to full postal services.