Memorandum submitted by Friends of Rippingdale
Post Office
POST OFFICE
LTD IGNORES
SELECT COMMITTEE
We are a village group fighting to retain our
PO branch, but this letter is not so much a plea about our case
in particular, as about the outrageous process by which PO Ltd
are conducting the closure programme, with Rippingdale in Lincolnshire
as an example of what's actually happening on the ground.
We watched your Select Committee sessions and
read the report of 8 February with some optimism—the Committee
took an eminently sensible, practical approach and we hoped that
PO Ltd would be influenced by your views, or to quote your report
" . . . that all those involved will use our report as a
prompt to make improvements very quickly indeed".
We hoped in vain.
Our group has been given extraordinary access
to senior PO management—we can't explain why, but suspect
it's because we have been one of the most vociferous. We have
been invited to three face-to-face discussions with such personnel
as Sue Huggins, Director of PO Network Change, Anthony Jones,
Regional Development Manager, Mark Partington, Network Change
Manager and Matt Silcock, External Relations Team—the last
on Friday 29 February.
At that meeting we had hoped to discuss with
Mr Jones and Mr Partington the findings of your Committee:
— the presumption that if a branch
is in the last shop in a village it should remain open;
— the strictly limited confidentiality
of information released to groups such as ours;
— the evidence given both by Alan Cook
and Pat McFadden that PO Ltd are open to "imaginative ideas
and viable alternative solutions"; and
— the PO suggestion for a mobile office
Outreach solution—more expensive than keeping the branch
open.
The PO representatives at Friday's meeting said
that:
— the "last shop presumption"
was not part of closure criteria;
— refused to divulge any information
about our village branch;
— refused to discuss our idea for an
alternative to closure; and
— referred us to their "core partner"
to discuss a further idea about developing Outreach.
This last leaves a very bad taste in the mouth
since that "partner" had already offered our sub-postmaster
the grand sum of £1,000 to keep his counter open for his
usual hours for a year. This works out at under 5p an hour—even
if it had been for our 13 hours-a-week Outreach, it would have
been under 70p an hour. PO Ltd say that offering pay levels grossly
below legal minimum wage levels is nothing to do with them and
that their deals with core partners are legal—even though
their partners are effectively employees.
I hope you agree that the ethics of this kind
of approach by an organisation like PO Ltd are simply unacceptable.
Worryingly one of the PO managers also stated
that the mobile office was an "interim solution", and
was then hastily and unconvincingly corrected by a colleague.
In our consultation dossier we refuted every
one of the original, so-called closure criteria, only to be told
at a meeting with Sue Huggins, Network Change Director, that they
had tried more than 60 templates for closure on those grounds
and had given up—what they'd actually gone for was a neat
pattern on a map.
We then demonstrated that Rippingale didn't
fit this approach either, since there are three villages in the
area which tick every and any closure criteria box. Again, no
reply was forthcoming and five months on we still have not been
told why our village branch has been selected for closure.
The word "sham" has been used many
times in the last few months about the closure consultations—in
our view with some justice.
Other words like "incompetent, inconsistent,
inarticulate, confusing, misleading, condescending, inflexible,
closed-minded, spring to mind and as taxpayers we're very concerned
about the future viability of the PO Network if this is the way
they operate.
We should make it clear that we accept the overall
logic of the closure plan and have no problem with closing loss-making,
poorly used branches—but our branch is outside the closure
criteria.
We hope the powers of the Select Committee are
sufficient to enforce democracy and a little justice, rather than
the dictatorship we appear to be facing in this context and would
be very happy to provide even more details of the appalling way
PO are behaving, either by email or face-to-face.
5 March 2008
| 
