Memorandum from Deborah Moggach
The closure of our local Post office ( South
End Road, London, NW3) has had a disastrous and destructive effect
on our local community. We fought to keep it open but failed,
and are now suffering the results. The local shops, already struggling
with parking restrictions, rising rents, the effects of online
shopping and so on, have been hanging on by their fingertips.
Many of them are now being forced to close, for the Post office
had been essential to them for posting parcels, banking, getting
change etc. They had also benefited from the passing trade, when
people visited the Post office, which has now disappeared. They
now have to get somebody to mind the shop while they walk half
a mile uphill everyday to collect cash( from the main Post office
where the queue snakes out into the street), and such an arrangement
has made their work all but impossible.
Local people have suffered, of course. This
has been the case throughout the country, especially in rural
communities. Here in my neighbourhood it's hit everybody. But
particularly the old, the poor and the vulnerable. The local Post
office kept them independent; now they cannot collect pensions
and benefits they are forced to rely on help. This is quite apart
from the personal interaction they had with the friendly staff
who knew their problems, and were often the only people they spoke
to all day.
It is incomprehensible to me, and to the many
millions who signed the protests, that the £150 million
per year needed to keep branch Post offices open—a drop
in the ocean compared to the money recently forked out to prop
up banks and other institutions, or spent on the war in Iraq,
or funding disastrous IT systems in hospitals—couldn't have
been found. The hidden costs of this insane decision—the
further break-up of our communities with all this entails—will
far outweigh this small sum.
Solutions can be found—where there's a
will there's a way. Post offices can be used as banks. ( a lot
more trusted than the other ones!) The local authority can use
them to sell parking permits and collect parking fines. There
are many ways in which their use can be expanded. All we need
is someone to put their mind to it. The last public consultation,
organized by the Post office, was a sham; we all knew the postmasters
and postmistresses had been offered a great deal of money to close,
and many of the facts in our local leaflet were totally inaccurate.
And we all knew the decision had already been
made. I do hope that this Government consultation will reverse
the climate of closures and acknowledge how vital our post offices
are to the social health of our country.
22 February 2009
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