Europe’s postal services do not have the best of reputations.

Long queues with people who somehow got there before you. Opening hours designed in open hostility to your lunch break. And delivery notices with a knack for showing up the moment you leave.

And yet, the operators and their workers are currently among the few systems that guarantee universal service at an affordable price, wherever you live: in a capital, a suburb, a village or on an island.

Whatever the drawbacks or benefits, the post, as we know it, is about to change.

The European Commission is preparing an EU Delivery Act this year, with a proposal expected after the summer. Although few details of the proposal are currently public, the plan is to rewrite postal rules built for a world that no longer exists.

The current framework rests on the postal services directive, last amended in 2008, and the 2018 rules on cross-border parcel delivery. In e-commerce years, that is basically pre-history.

Back then, an eBay horror story was a regular topic of small talk, and Amazon had not yet become the emergency infrastructure of everyday life.

The reason for the change is simple. The market the EU rules were built for has almost disappeared.

For decades, national postal operators financed their public-service role through letters. Mail volumes were predictable, monopoly protections were stronger, and the post office was partly state infrastructure and partly a physical place where you discovered your patience had limits.

There was also a social contract behind it. Whether state-owned, partly privatised or operating with the state as a major shareholder, postal operators across the EU were expected to serve the whole country.

Each country designated one universal service provider, which had to maintain a basic guarantee known as the Universal Service Obligation (USO).

The USO is what separates a universal postal network from a purely commercial delivery market. A private courier may decide that a dense urban route is attractive while a remote village route is not. A universal service provider, like La Poste, Deutsche Post, or Correos, cannot.

Bills moved online. So did tax forms, passport applications and bank statements. These days, the closest many people get to physical mail is a parking fine, or, perhaps, a letter to Santa.

At the same time, parcel volumes have boomed to 12 million per day, and delivery is expected to grow by 130% over the next few years.

“E-commerce growth gave postal operators a new business opportunity, but certainly not an easy one,” says Pier Luigi Parcu, director of the Centre for a Digital Society at the European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre, who also researches postal reform.

And this growth did not automatically save universal operators from the decline in letter volumes.

On the contrary, “they suddenly found themselves in a very difficult position,” Parcu adds. “Rules designed for the old postal world, such as daily delivery requirements, became harder and more expensive to manage.”

Some operators, Poste Italiane among them, diversified into financial services, telecoms, energy or cross-border logistics, says Anna Renata Pisarkiewicz, an assistant professor at the Centre for a Digital Society, which organises one of the biggest postal and delivery economics conferences.

The next conference, taking place in Cologne from Wednesday to Friday, will look at innovation and the many headaches now facing the postal and delivery sectors. The Commission is expected to be in the room, too.

Parcel market

Parcels looked like the answer. They were not. Traditional operators moved into single-piece parcels, handling nearly 5,4 billion per year, and they are especially useful for small and medium enterprises moving into e-commerce.

But they moved into a market that was already getting crowded. Platforms such as Amazon had also worked out that logistics was not just the boring bit after the sale. It was power.

“They started building their own delivery systems, turning themselves from customers of postal networks into competitors,” Parcu explains.

So the parcel market became competitive. But it did not become equal.

“A public postal service doesn’t get to deny delivery if it isn’t profitable, like a private delivery service can,” says Dimitris Theodorakis, the director for post and logistics at the trade union UNI Europa.

PostEurop agrees that it is subject to obligations that private companies are not, including environmental standards, which require “a lot of investments”.

“We carry a regulatory burden, from due diligence to taxonomy rules, but we need a level playing field that allows us to compete. Otherwise, the postal network could disappear – and that network is hugely important for citizens,” Szebeny says.

Private couriers also use the postal infrastructure. It wasn’t that Europe’s postal systems set out to become the backbone of the e-commerce boom. It just happened. The workers were already there. So were the depots.

That leaves Brussels with a difficult question. Should only traditional postal operators carry the burden? Should parcel companies, couriers and platform-style delivery firms contribute if they offer similar services to consumers?

None of those choices is neutral. “Without mandatory contributions from all actors in the delivery chain, the USO becomes financially unviable,” Theodorakis says. That means expanding the universal service obligation to cover parcels, not just letters.

PostEurop, meanwhile, wants to preserve the core of the universal service obligation for letters and single-piece parcels, without necessarily forcing private companies to share the burden directly.

Keep you posted

The EU Delivery Act is not only about parcels, prices and delivery routes. It will also shape the future of Europe’s 1.8 million postal workers.

Uni Europa, which is running the Save the Post campaign to protect postal workers, says they are not defending the post as a museum piece. Workers do not want postal work to turn into yet another corner of the gig economy.

If universal postal networks shrink, what replaces them may be cheaper, but not necessarily better.

The fear is a delivery market built on “false self-employment, layered subcontracting designed to dodge legal and collective bargaining responsibilities and Amazon-style algorithmic management that pushes workers to move faster”, Theodorakis adds.

What is next?

The Commission is consulting on three options for a future EU Delivery Act. The idea is to bring the old postal rules and the rules on cross-border parcel delivery into one framework.

In simple terms, Brussels has to decide how big the fix should be: a small update, a targeted reform or a much bigger rewrite of the delivery market.

According to Pisarkiewicz, the reform must also recognise that European countries have very different postal systems.

Some are more digitalised than others. Some still rely more heavily on letters. Governments also interpret the universal service obligation differently, and do not all have the same appetite for changing it.

Any future EU framework, she argues, will need to be flexible enough to address those differences and future-proof for a market that is still changing.

That points towards a directive, which would leave more flexibility for EU countries, rather than a regulation that sets the same rules across the bloc. Brussels may like harmonisation, but it knows that not every problem can be solved by pretending Denmark and Bulgaria have the same delivery economics.

“Not everything in delivery needs to be regulated. Some parts of the market can be left to competition. That can improve services, lower prices, and encourage innovation,” Parcu says.

But other parts of the network serve a wider social purpose: reaching remote communities, supporting vulnerable users, delivering essential goods and keeping services running during crises. They are still valuable.

Nobody in Brussels is seriously preparing for the great postcard comeback. Especially after Brexit, which rather inconveniently removed one of the countries most attached to letters from the EU.

But it is preparing to decide what should be left to the market, what should still be protected and who should pick up the bill when delivery to everyone stops being profitable.

(bw, cm)