Letter from Naomi Nardi, Bridestowe Post
Office & Riverside Stores
Having just watched the 10 June BERR Committee
meeting, I very much appreciate that you took my submission about
Partner Outreach seriously enough to raise it there. Thank you.
Regarding Mr Cook's response using the illustration
of employees of Tesco & W H Smith. Those are not Outreaches
and the structures of the different businesses do not relate to
one another at all.
The core sub-postmasters do not directly employ
Partners. If they did, we would very much welcome the minimum
wage.
In fact, Partners are being offered around £2,000
to £3,000 per annum, depending upon transaction numbers and
the deal struck with the Core. That is approximately £8 to
£12 per day gross for up to 9-10 hours a day, and often across
seven days a week.
In our own situation, given the stricture by
POL to offer Partner Outreach for the entire time that our retail
side functions, we would earn £1.23 an hour, gross. This
is too busy a shop and PO to run single-handed and so in effect,
one of us would have to work for the Post Office for almost nothing.
If we need holiday or sickness cover, for which we must pay minimum
legal rates, we make a loss. In an unguarded moment the core sub-postmaster
put forward for us here, told us that he thought a business would
"have to be desperate" to take it on!
I really regret not having emphasised the actual
payments being offered in my previous submission. I had not wanted
to make it too personal and so not relevant to the Committee.
This payment structure may satisfy Mr Cook's wish to get Post
Office services as cheaply as possible but it is truly not viable
in the long term.
The "default" option of a mobile outreach
has been shown locally to be no more than an alternative slow
death. With erratic hours and practical difficulties, communities
in Devon & Cornwall now find that Mobiles are being withdrawn—presumably
because the core sub-postmasters running them could not earn a
decent income either.
I very much hope that the Committee sees fit
to revisit the detail of Outreaches. They are such a major element
of the programme, especially in vulnerable rural areas. Without
proper finance and safeguards to secure Outreaches, people in
large tracts of the country will face major problems reaching
postal services and cash in a year or so when they fail.
22 June 2008
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