Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-259)
POST OFFICE
LTD
5 FEBRUARY 2008
Q240 Mr Hoyle: Would you please send
us that information of whom they actually met with?
Mr Cook: Yes.
Q241 Mr Hoyle: Now, what do you think
I could do for the Bolton Road Post Office which wishes to stay
open and has between 1,000 and 1,500 customers a week, that is
in a deprived area which has a low car ownership and has a lot
of elderly people, 500 new properties are being built within 1,000
yards of this post office, with good parking outside and yet it
is down for closure? Where is the communication on this?
Mr Cook: What you can do is represent
those views to us and we will look at that in consultation with
all the other post offices that are in that area. Do not forget,
there have already been a significant number of post offices turned
over for closure when more information has come to light, but
I cannot possibly comment on one individual post office out of
14,300.
Q242 Mr Hoyle: I am sorry, I would
have thought you would have been well briefed about what I was
going to ask you and it is funny that you are not, but let me
take it a bit further because it was well known about the post
office that closed across the lake. Do you remember that? It did
have a road to it, but you closed it. The two post offices that
were used as an example to close other post offices in your last
review, Bolton Road and Coppull, were the post offices that said,
"These will stoke up the business and that's why we're closing
the other post offices". You have now come back and the ones
that you used as a reason for closing the other are now down for
closure. The whole thing is flawed. You have changed the rules
and the whole thing is a disgrace. You need to consider your position.
Mr Cook: Hopefully, you were listening
to my introduction when I explained the loss of government services'
income over the last three or four years. This business has £400
million less income than before, so arguments about the viability
of post offices three or four years ago will not necessarily work
now. If the area, as you have suggested, is a high benefits area,
those post offices will be disproportionately impacted because
their income comes off—
Q243 Mr Hoyle: Do you take new build
into account?
Mr Cook: We take new build into
account.
Q244 Mr Hoyle: Because it is not
in your review.
Mr Cook: Well, that will be a
useful piece of input.
Q245 Mr Bailey: Can we move on to
the management style for the process. It would appear that sub-postmasters
are rather reluctant to discuss the programme and to speak to
their MPs. Could this be the fear from the notorious `intimidation
letter' which I believe has been subsequently retracted and can
you promise us quite categorically that compensation packages
for sub-postmasters will not be affected if they do consult their
MP's?
Mr Cook: I can categorically promise
that and, as you well know, at the time I issued a personal retraction
and it was unfortunate that the letter went out, or that is probably
an understatement, to be perfectly honest. I think at the end
of the day actions speak louder than words and six/seven months
on no compensation has been docked and indeed I think we carry
the process out in a very open and transparent way. As I mentioned
earlier, 123 MPs have had meetings with us since the consultation
process began.
Q246 Mr Bailey: Who was responsible
for that letter?
Mr Cook: It was an administrative
error inside the organisation and, I have to say, the fact that
an incorrect draft of the letter was sent out, whilst it was unfortunate,
it is actually disturbing that the draft was even produced in
the first place, so this is not something that we are proud of,
but I think we need to put it into perspective. It happened in
the opening weeks of the programme, I issued a personal retraction
and we have not exhibited any of those behaviours. Indeed, I think
we have behaved very responsibly towards postmasters and I have
explained earlier the question about confidentiality, but there
is no linkage between confidentiality and compensation. All that
it means is, if someone does not want to sign up to the confidentiality,
then we cannot share the information about other postmasters,
as I explained earlier.
Q247 Mr Bailey: Would you not agree
that somewhere within the organisation, for a letter like that
to go out, there would exist a culture that was not perhaps, shall
we say, conducive to good management and good relations?
Mr Cook: It is a great disappointment
to me that the letter went out. It should not have gone out. It
was literally an administrative error where the wrong version
of the letter was despatched and the letter had been corrected,
but that is not an excuse. It is not acceptable, but, as I say,
actions speak louder than words.
Q248 Mr Hoyle: Whose name was on
it? Who signed it off?
Mr Cook: It was not in my name,
I do not think, no.
Q249 Mr Hoyle: Well, was it?
Mr Cook: The apology was certainly
in my name.
Q250 Mr Bailey: Was any action taken
against the person or persons who drafted the letter?
Mr Cook: We had to put in place
a different procedure to make sure that incorrect versions of
letters could not be issued. If someone makes a mistake, if you
are saying, "Should you run around firing people because
they made a mistake?", only if it is persistent, only if
it is negligent. The consequence was significant and we put lots
of steps in place to make sure that that does not happen again.
Q251 Mr Bailey: I am not in the business
of recommending that you fire people, but I would expect, in the
event of something that was so disastrous to the, shall we say,
management relations in this process, that there would have been
a proportionate response from yourself to the person or persons
involved.
Mr Cook: We took the necessary
action.
Roger Berry: If it had been a government
minister, there would have been hell to pay.
Mr Hoyle: They would have had to resign.
Q252 Mr Bailey: I will move on to
another point because we have made the point here. The CWU claims
that you have not told the Crown office workers of their rights
under TUPE, and they are being offered payments of £1,000
on condition that they do not campaign against franchising. Why
is this?
Mr Cook: The proposal was that
we would make a continuity payment, and one of the concerns when
we did the deal with WHSmith was that the elapsed time from when
the deal was announced and the locations were announced to when
a post office would actually convert could be quite some time
because of the builds of the post offices in all the branches
and it will not finish until June when they found out last May.
What we wanted was to create an environment where people were
happy to continue to work at the post office and provide the level
of service that we felt customers were entitled to, so we call
the payment a `continuity payment' which basically was designed
to create an environment where the post office would continue
to operate normally in that intervening period. The definition
at the time of "continue to operate normally" was to
maintain the same level of performance in terms of queue times,
sales, whatever, but also to provide a positive impression to
customers when they came in so as not to bemoan their lot, as
it were, at the counter because we wanted the post office to feel
as good as it ever had done, ready for its transfer. We said that
the redundancy payment would then be paid at the end, if that
is what they wanted to do, or they would then relocate to another
post office and we offered a further payment of £1,000 in
recognition of that achievement for all individuals.
Q253 Chairman: Can I suggest that
we ask you for a written note of your assessment of the propriety
of what you have done. I would have thought that this put you
directly in breach of the TUPE Rules and I cannot be at all sanguine
about this.
Mr Cook: Well, we can do because,
as you mentioned earlier, there certainly is a tribunal hearing
planned and, I have to say, we are equally confident that we are
within our rights.
Chairman: Within the limits of sub
judice, I think we would like further details on this because
I cannot see how you are complying with the law myself, but I
must be very careful about this because I will get myself into
trouble with the Clerk.
Anne Moffat: I would actually like to
see the letter that was sent out to members of staff.
Chairman: Yes, that would be helpful.
Mr Hoyle: And the original letter sent
to the post offices that was since withdrawn would be useful to
the Committee.
Chairman: Indeed, but we can talk to
you afterwards about that.
Q254 Mr Weir: I would like to ask
you about Outreach arrangements. Can you tell us if these arrangements
are only being considered where there are closures? Now, I noted
earlier, Ms Vennells, you said that you are putting provision
in postcode areas below the national criteria. Can you tell us
a bit about how these are going to work and is it just where there
are closures in this programme and in the excepted postcode areas
or are you willing to look at other areas where there is an inadequate
service, for example, villages that have previously lost their
post office and have no postal services at present?
Ms Vennells: I will take that
in chunks, if I may. Are we likely to do them outside of the closure
programme? Yes, because by the end of the closure programme we
will have around about 1,000 outreaches and, in terms of the future
sustainability of the network, it seems to be proving to be a
very useful model for us and the communities they go into, so
yes, we would look elsewhere, whether that is in urban or indeed
where we already are in rural. There are different versions of
Outreach and there are essentially four different ones, but one
of the most popular one is the mobile version because actually
one of the advantages of that is that it tends to bring more services
to the communities it actually services than previously, so all
of our mobile outreaches, for instance, do the vehicle licensing
which many remote post offices actually do not have currently,
so that is a real win for a community. The partner and the hosted
outreaches tend to work very well also, but what we do as part
of the consultation process now is we actually look at what type
of Outreach will be the most appropriate for the community we
propose to put it into. As I say, our experience to date is that
they have been very well received where they are up and running.
Q255 Mr Weir: Last week some of your
colleagues brought one of the vans to the House of Commons and
many of us went to see it, an impressive-looking van. I represent
a rural community and I can see many of my communities being quite
happy to see that coming where they have no service at present,
but I am still not entirely clear. I have, within my constituency,
two of the excepted postcode areas which have an inadequate service
at present. I also have several villages that, under the old criteria,
had an inadequate service because the post office closed and no
one else would take it on. Under the new criteria, they no longer
have that because they are within however many miles of a town,
but would you be prepared to look at, if you were introducing
a van into the postcode-excepted areas, for example, also extending
its range to visit these other villages?
Ms Vennells: I think that is something
we would certainly look at because in those areas of the excluded
postcodes we know that we have actually got to go back in and
look at the provision properly, so yes, we would.
Q256 Mr Weir: So you would extend
beyond the excluded postcode areas?
Ms Vennells: We would look at
how feasible that was, yes.
Q257 Mr Weir: As a matter of interest,
how many of these vans do you anticipate introducing throughout
the country?
Ms Vennells: We have got six at
the moment serving 80 communities and I think we have another
20 on order. It is difficult to forecast exactly because each
particular Outreach is obviously viewed on an individual case
basis, but they have proved extremely popular actually, better
than the home delivery which is one of the other Outreach options.
Q258 Mr Weir: Could you tell us a
bit about how Outreach development is to be funded? It has been
suggested to us that you are offering potential premises-providers
£3 an hour to pay for the hosted service. I wonder if that
is really enough and is anybody going to take it up at that sort
of level?
Ms Vennells: I cannot comment
on the specifics of £3 an hour, but the way we pay the core
sub-postmaster that runs the Outreach is on the cost of the premises
they require, so, if it is a church hall or a village hall or
something like that, the chances are in some cases they probably
are around £3 an hour, but I know in some cases they are
£6 an hour, so we would pay them whatever the costs are for
the premises they need for the amount of time, we pay their travel
costs and then also we pay them on a transaction basis for the
services given, so I am not sure where the £3 an hour came
from.
Q259 Mr Weir: So it would depend
on the premises that were being used?
Ms Vennells: Yes.
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