Brexit & a Clueless PostNL

We received a letter from the Dutch Post Office (PostNL) last week. It told us that they had received a packet addressed to us from abroad and that they were legally obliged to make a Customs Declaration on it. The letter further stated that there were no details on the contents of the package and that we needed to give these details online.

I went to the website (post.nl/track-en-trace) and filled in the reference code given in the letter. I found myself faced with a series of questions:

• Was this a purchase or a gift?
• What was the nature of the contents?
• How many items were in the package?
• What was the value of the items?

Since we hadn’t purchased anything from outside of the EU recently, it had to be a gift, but since it was a gift, how the devil would we know what the package contained, how many items there would be, and what the value would be?

I said as much in my reply, and gambled that if it was a gift, the value would be no more than €20.

That seems to have satisfied PostNL, because the package landed in the letterbox today. It turns out to be chocolates sent as a Christmas present by my niece in Scotland. She posted it two months ago, and as evidence of the utter cluelessness of PostNL, she had a signed and dated Customs Declaration label on it stating that the contents were chocolates, and of a value that did not attract import duty. Furthermore, she had her return address on the package – why couldn’t PostNL tell us this, so we could have put two and two together?

By way of contrast, there was a second package in the letterbox for me today. This was a second-hand book that I ordered just last week. It also came from abroad, but since it came from Ireland (in the EU), it just tootled across to the Netherlands without generating paperwork and delays.

Brexit is a disaster, both great and small.