Memorandum submitted by Save Our Post
Offices Campaign, Herefordshire (POS 12)
1. SUBMISSION
This submission is being made by Jesse Norman,
Co-Ordinator of the Save Our Post Offices Campaign for Herefordshire.
It reflects almost a year of consultation, research and discussion
with local residents, user groups, sub-postmasters and-mistresses,
local government officials, parish councils and other interested
bodies into the scandal of Post Office closures.
2. CAMPAIGN
The Campaign is a county-wide effort to prevent
the closure of post offices in Herefordshire. There are over 60
post offices in the County, and we estimate that as many as 22
could close under, or as an indirect result of, the Government's
closure programme. If this occurs it will hugely undermine the
quality of life of both in village communities and in Hereford
City and the market towns.
3. COMMUNITY
RESOURCE
Underlying the closures programme is a new and
fundamentally flawed conception within this Government of the
value of a small post office. Of course, post offices operate
in a commercial environment and there will generally be some closures
in the ordinary course of business. But a local post office is
also almost always a crucial community resource. It provides cash,
access to benefits and other services locally that are hard to
obtain for many disadvantaged groups. It serves small business.
It often supports a small shop where none could exist commercially.
And it is also the first line of community defence for many elderly,
disabled and disadvantaged people. We know that a particular problem
among the elderly is simple loneliness, and post office is an
important place to meet others and socialize.
4. PRINCIPLE
DISCARDED
Government policy has historically recognised
Post Office's community role, and it is this that has justified
the subsidy to PO counters. Now, in the face of commercial pressures
on the Post Office as a whole, the present Government has been
panicked into the new closures programme, discarding a long-held
and historically bipartisan principle of community support.
5. FUNDING
The commercial cost of maintaining a strong
network is in fact a manageable one. The Government's subsidy
to Post Offices of £150 million p.a. is just 0.02% of the
£627 billion in public spending in 2007 overall. In contrast,
the Public Accounts Committee found in May 2007 that over £1.9
billion had been wasted—equivalent by itself to over 12
years of government subsidy.
6. LACK OF
CREDIBILITY
The credibility of the closures programme has
been further weakened by a host of factors. The Government has
been resolutely unwilling to take responsibility for it, and has
put the Post Office in the firing line instead. The Post Office
has run the closures on a rolling schedule rather than implementing
them at one time, apparently in order to minimize the political
reaction. There has been a scandalous lack of transparency in
the Post Office's dealings with sub-postmasters and the public.
There has been a well-documented attempt to intimidate sub-postmasters
and—mistresses into following the Post Office's party line
through anonymous informants and the threat of withdrawal of future
compensation.
7. POLITICAL
MOTIVATION
There is also a good deal of reported public
concern at possible political motivation behind the closures,
through targeting them in predominantly rural areas where there
are relatively few Labour constituencies. This concern has been
magnified by press reports (eg in The Guardian, 26 October
2006, Daily Mail, 21 December 2006) that the Government
has used so-called heat maps to target hospital and education
closures in non-Labour areas to minimize electoral damage. It
would be helpful if the Committee could analyse the closures so
far to assess whether this political targeting is in fact taking
place.
8. PAPER CONSULTATION
EXERCISE
However, the key point is that the programme
itself is also fundamentally flawed. In particular, the Government's
decision to base it exclusively on geographic access criteria
now looks little short of disastrous. In the first place, it makes
a mockery of the consultation exercise: for if geographic criteria
are being used, then which Post Offices meet the criteria can
be determined now, in a largely mechanical way; and if that is
so, then the Government already in effect knows which post offices
will close, and so the consultation becomes a dead letter, a purely
paper exercise.
9. POOR CRITERIA
In addition, however, the decision to use geographic
access criteria relegates to the background several factors that
are of arguably much greater importance. It relegates how successful
the Post Office is, how many customers it has and its commercial
effectiveness. And worse of all, it entirely ignores any assessment
of local needs. The result of this is that thoroughly effective
Post Offices and Post Offices in areas of great deprivation will
be closed simply because of a dumb bureaucratic rule: that they
do not meet the access criteria.
10. NCC REPORT
A report in September 2007 by the National Consumer
Council suggests how the closures programme will be undermined
the failure to assess needs local needs. It found on a robust
statistical analysis that the withdrawal of Post Offices is regressive,
affecting worst those who can least deal with the loss of service.
Post Offices were especially important in more disadvantaged areas,
affecting in particular the elderly, the disabled, single mothers
with children, carers and those with limited access to cars or
public transportation.
11. BAD FOR
ENVIRONMENT
The other clear effect of Post Office closures
is to damage the environment. Inevitably, many users will not
have access to public transport, or will not feel safe in using
it. They will be forced by the programme to use cars instead,
increasing pollution and traffic at precisely the time when we
as a nation should be seeking to minimize them.
12. EFFECT ON
HEREFORDSHIRE
We in Herefordshire are bracing ourselves for
the worst. There has already been a spate of local informal closures,
in Colwall, Bartestree and on the Brampton Road in Hereford. These
have come in advance of the Government's closures programme, largely
as a result of the removal of the requirement on the Post Office
to prevent avoidable closures. We now face the loss of as many
as 22 post offices, while the number of our over-85 year olds
is projected to rise by 75% by 2020. The damage to village life
and to our urban communities will be enormous.
10 January 2008
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