Your wins: Rural deliveries resume after access concerns sorted

Jana is 80 and lives on her own in the country near Whanganui. She has mobility issues and lives up a long driveway so gets a lot of things, including food, couriered to the garage beside her house.

“Parcels were delivered to the garage for years,” she said. “In addition, a kind postman used to pick up my daily paper (he was not asked) and left it with the parcels in the garage.”

But in March, NZ Post suddenly stopped dropping her packages at all. Instead, it told her to collect them from town. The courier driver had complained about the difficulty of reversing down her driveway and back on to the main highway.

She contacted NZ Post, which agreed to resume delivering her items to her garage. But in June the deliveries stopped again, and she received leaflets saying her parcels could not be delivered.

When she queried this, she was told the driver had complained about the visibility on the driveway as well as dogs running around the property.

“I explained that there are no dogs running unsupervised,” Jana said. “My elderly, harmless corgi is a house dog and is out only with me.”

After complaining to NZ Post again, she received a letter saying their local driver was concerned about the vegetation on the driveway which obstructed the view, the fact her gate was closed when drivers should not have to open gates, and that he had to open the garage. NZ Post suggested she put a large box at the gate so the items could be dropped there. She pointed out that this would not be practical as she could not carry the parcels from that distance.

So she got in touch with us to see if we could help her get her goods delivered again.

Our adviser looked at the NZ Post delivery rules and suggested to Jana that she arrange for the vegetation on her driveway to be cut back. We also suggested she send photos to NZ Post to show them this had been done. And we advised that she take photos of the turning area to show that that reversing back down the driveway was not necessary. We also recommended she leave the gate open for the delivery driver.

She did all these things and also provided a waterproof box outside her garage for the driver to drop her parcels in, so the driver wouldn’t need to open the garage door.

It seemed to do the trick. Jana has since received all her delayed packages from June and the postal operator agreed to bring the packages up the driveway to the box outside her garage from now on.