Postal company PostNL has called on the government to give it more time to deliver letters, citing the shortage of delivery staff.

Currently, letters are supposed to be delivered within 24 hours but PostNL wants to shift this to two days and, eventually, three, chief executive Herna Verhagen said at the presentation of the company’s annual results on Monday.

At the end of last year, 82% of letters were delivered within 24 hours, well below the 95% target. Deliveries were earlier scrapped on Monday because of staffing problems.

“We strongly believe the time has come to transform the delivery framework to better fit the needs of our customers and consumers and the current labour market,” Verhagen said in a press statement.

“We intend to transition towards a service level for standard mail to be delivered within two days, moving towards within three days over time. We will keep offering priority delivery, at a higher price. All this is already common in many other European countries.”

Research shows that 70% of people post a letter or card less than once a month and 79% would have no problem with slower delivery, PostNL said.

Last year PostNL processed 1.7 billion letters and cards, down from 1.8 billion in 2022. The company expects volumes to fall between 7% and 9% this year.

The number of packages delivered by the company last year remained stable at 343 million items, but this is less than PostNL had forecast, due to a downturn in deliveries from domestic webshops.

PostNL published full year revenue up slightly at €3.16 billion.