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Dr. Cable: To be fair to the system, there are one or two cases in which the decision has been reversed, but it is clear from conversations with the people involved that Postwatch, the organisation charged with the inquiries, is overwhelmed by the volume. It does not have the resources to give detailed attention to every individual decision. Closures are happening even though a handful of decisions have been reversed.
If the closure programme is to be slowed down, the Post Office must find alternative sources of income. That has been the problem from the beginning, which was identified in the excellent Cabinet Office study a few years ago. Where can income come from? First, the easier Post Office card accounts are to access, the more people use them, and the more income comes to the Post Office, directly and from footfall. Secondly—this goes back to the exchange that I had with the hon. Member for Stafford—it does not matter whether people use the banks provided that they can use their bank account in the Post Office and cash cheques. If that system works efficiently and fairly, the Post Office receives income, the people still come to the Post Office and the problem is alleviated. Insufficient pressure is being put on the banks, which are effectively opting out of that system at present.
Thirdly, we have the question of new sources of income. The postmasters have already had the disappointment of the "Your Guide" system being pulled from under them. I have seen the finances of that scheme and it did not make commercial sense for the Post Office, so I can see why it did not go ahead with it. Other options are being explored. I understand that a good e-shopping system is now being developed in post offices in Cornwall. That development has been entirely spontaneous, it is profitable and may offer a future for substantial parts of the system. The Government really do need to give it the kind of support that it deserves.
Mr. Chris Mole (Ipswich): Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the development of internet shopping provides an increasing opportunity for goods to be delivered and picked up at local post offices rather than people having to go through the experience of receiving a card that says that a delivery attempt has been made but that the parcel has been taken away again?
Dr. Cable: The hon. Gentleman is right. There are major potential synergies between the different parts of the Post Office that have only just begun to be explored.
We are faced with an unnecessary disaster here. If those different elements of additional income were brought on stream, if the Post Office card account were made accessible, if cheque cashing were made easily accessible through all the banks, the process of transition for Post Office Counters Ltd. would be easily manageable and not painful.
To set matters right, the Government have only to make Post Office card accounts easily accessible, on a par with the other streams of drawing cash from post
offices, bring more pressure to bear on the banks and be much more proactive about helping new sources of income generation.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: At the risk of stating the obvious, there is a very short time left for Back Benchers. I am sure that it will be appreciated across the House if speeches could be fairly brief so that we can try to improve the breadth of the debate as far as possible.
6.17 pm
Mr. David Kidney (Stafford): I shall do my best to be as brief as you have urged us to be, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
I do not think that it is right to say that the Post Office card account might be the saviour of post offices. Just before Christmas in Stafford I faced a big audience of sub-postmasters and sub-post mistresses and local and parish councillors who were all concerned about the future of their post offices and wanted a great campaign to ensure that everybody signed up for a Post Office card account. I sympathised with them for their struggling businesses and the obstacles in the way of people opening Post Office card accounts, so I had meetings with Ministers, asked parliamentary questions and wrote to Ministers about the obstacles. I endorse everything that the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) said on that subject. But I had the feeling that people were clinging to a diminishing market that in the end would see them out of business, and I recognised that it was as important to ensure that there were other opportunities for post offices.
This year in Stafford, jointly with my Staffordshire Parish Councils Association, I held a working lunch for all the people whom we could think of who could help with post offices. They included the Post Office and Postwatch, for obvious reasons; the National Federation of Sub-Postmasters, which has money from the Government's Phoenix fund to offer advice and assistance to its members; the Countryside Agency, because of the support that it can give in rural areas with its community services grants and so on; and Business Link, because of its help to small businesses, the chief executive of which said there and then that it could give free and subsidised help to any post office or small business that asked for it and subsequently agreed to make that clear to every post office in Staffordshire.
Also present was our regional development agency, Advantage West Midlands, which is responsible for economic development. It provided a list of people who could offer venture capital funds, including an enterprising fund in north Staffordshire dispensing very small amounts to give people access at the bottom end of the market. BT was there because it sponsored the lunch and already has a significant working relationship with the Post Office, which it wants to continue. It is particularly interested in broadband connections in rural areas. The Learning and Skills Council was represented because of its responsibility for training and life-long learning.
That brings me to what happened next. This week, we had a meeting at Rodbaston college of further education, which we chose because it already has experience of such issues through offering courses on business diversification. Those are used mostly by farmers, but it occurred to me that many post offices
might want advice and training on diversification. At the meeting, the college said that it could help in many ways—not only through that course, but by advising post offices about marketing, business management, book-keeping, and disseminating best practice between themselves, perhaps going on to form clusters of post offices that can support each other. We are hoping to put together a package to offer those options to every post office in Staffordshire.I want to mention, as did the hon. Member for Twickenham, the follow-up to "Your Guide". The evaluation was not quite positive enough about increased footfall and sales, and the Government therefore decided not to pursue it at their own expense. Now, private enterprise is trying to make it successful, with the first opening, by E-Daily, taking place in Cornwall in May. E-Daily has an ambitious programme of making touch screens available in 15,000 places around the country by the end of next year, which would be an impressive achievement. Next week, I am due to go to its Bayswater office to look at the technology to see whether there is something in it. It has an e-shopping aspect. The touch screens also give access to information on local government and the goods and services that are available in the immediate locality. That represents an exciting possibility. I had hoped that BT could offer such a service, but E-Daily got in first.
Nationally, there are the TV advertising campaign, with the three choices that were mentioned; the Post Office's own campaign, "Carry on Collecting", with which it has now been allowed to proceed; and the campaign by the Communication Workers Union, "Do your banking at the Post Office".
Each one of us individually can play our part, just like the people I listed, in helping post offices in our areas to expand their business base and to increase their footfall. They should not keep looking back to the business that they used to get from the Government and try to cling to as much of it as possible for as long as possible, but try to develop modern successful businesses in which people can feel that they have a future. That is my ambition in my area, and I hope that it is every other Member's ambition in their area.
6.22 pm
Mr. James Arbuthnot (North-East Hampshire): Some extremely valuable points have been made on both sides of the House. In view of the pressure of time, I shall make only three points.My first point concerns the promotion of the card account. On Monday, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) asked the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions:
- "Why are sub-post offices not allowed to promote it to their customers?"
- "Many sub-postmasters and postmistresses have been energetic in promoting the Post Office card accounts."
- "As I said . . . in my initial answer, around half of the pensioners who have responded requested the Post Office card account. That hardly points to failure to promote it."—[Official Report, 9 June 2003; Vol. 406, c. 387.]
My second point concerns the complexity of the card account. I believe that Ministers have been actively trying to discourage the card account. In April, a memo went out from head office saying that an instruction had been issued to the effect that when post offices applied for card accounts, two forms had to be attached to each other, and that if they were not, the application would thereby be rendered invalid. However, the memo also stated that everything would be changed and that the two forms were not to be attached to each other after all. Moreover, it stated that attached forms would render the application invalid.
That might sound like a funny bureaucratic muddle, but it is not funny; it is serious. It is not surprising that another memo went out from head office last week. It stated that the process of applying for card accounts was so complicated that 25 per cent. of applications had been rejected. Consequently, the applicants whose applications have been rejected must undergo the whole awful rigmarole again. The vulnerable in our society are being worn down to persuade them to accept the Government's options. It will not do.
Pensioners are being discouraged. In April, I visited seven sub-post offices in my constituency, and I spoke to some sub-postmasters again today. One told me that pensioners in my constituency understand that they will not be able to collect their benefits from post offices but will have do that through their bank accounts. Many who have bank accounts are being panicked into giving details of them, and to them, that means that they will not be able to collect benefits from a post office.
My third point is that this is a serious matter. In south Warnborough in my constituency, the sub-post office is also the village shop, the local coffee house, the meeting place and the informal social services centre. For many pensioners, the walk to the post office every week is the only time that they get out and meet anybody. It may be the only time that they get any company. Some pensioners stay in the post office for hours, doing nothing except enjoying the company of those who come in at the same time. In that way, they can be checked on. If they do not turn up, the post office sends out the local rural support group. It is informal but effective. The Government have not fully understood the effect of their proposals on rural areas.
After my recent tour of the sub-post offices in my constituency, Mr. Tony James, the sub-postmaster at Selborne, a lovely rural village, which, like so many, revolves around the village post office, said that he believed that it was too late. He said that,
- "by actively encouraging the payment of benefits and pensions via bank accounts, the Government is taking the lifeblood away from the post office".
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