Post Danmark enforces placement rule for household letterboxes
Post Danmark has said 99.5% of Danish household letter boxes are now in compliance with legislation requiring proper placement at the street. Denmark’s Postal Act of December 2010, which opened up the Danish postal market to full competition, allows postal operators to refuse delivery to households that do not have letter boxes in the right place.
The letter box requirement came into effect at the start of this year, with Post Danmark warning customers several times to comply, or find their mail returned to sender. Parcels can continue to be delivered to the doorstep under the rules.
The postal operator, part of Scandinavian firm PostNord, sent a final 174,000 letters out in January urging households to comply, and in recent weeks a team of consultants has been deployed to check up on individual households.
The Post has now said most households are now following the rules.
Eva Malene Hartmann, Post Danmark’s head of consumer business, said: “We are pleased that the vast majority of Danes have their letterbox in place. Unfortunately, there are about 12,000 households that do not, and they will no longer receive mail. Once the mailbox is set up properly, we can again begin to deliver the mail to those households.”
Houses built after 1973 in Denmark have always been required to place their letter boxes by the street rather than the doorstep, but older properties were exempt to the rules until this year.
Post Danmark said about 800,000 of the country’s 2.6m households had to move their mailbox by the 1 January, 2012, deadline.
Hartmann said most Danes had their letterboxes in place when the Act came into force in January, but that a few months after the deadline, it was only fair now to require all householders to comply.
But she said the Post was confident that when households start finding their mail is no longer being delivered, they will put a proper letterbox in place.
“This issue is important to Danes,” said Hartmann. “It is a nuisance to both the recipient and sender when the mail must be sent back. Fortunately, we can see that every day more new mailboxes are up, and there are fewer and fewer addresses where the mail carrier has to return with the mail.”
