I know, I know, it’s shooting at Bambi, but I confess I just don’t get the Lib Dems’ Post Office Campaigns.
I don’t mean by this that I have a rabid desire to close every post office in the country, or even that I don’t accept the case that, in some locations, like remote rural communities, they are useful, loved and necessary. It’s more that I can’t think of many campaigns I’m less likely to get out of bed for than this one.
The problem I have is that, while I accept petitions to save local public services, rather like campaigns in favour of orphans and chocolate, are effective short-term publicity, I didn’t really get into politics simply to aggregate target data for our EARS database.
I have the inconvenient belief that campaigning should be for either some meaningful positive change or to stop something bad happening. I can’t fit most post office campaigns into either of those boxes. My contention is that often these campaigns are trivial, and make us in the long-run look trivial and parochial by association.
As an example, a recent urban Liberal Democrat ‘Save our Post Office’ petition amounted to little more than opposition to the hypothetical chance of the service moving from a physical post office building to the counters at WH Smith. A campaign that implied the burning political issue was that customer service in one of the UK’s more successful retailers might not be as good as that provided by the commercially unviable alternative. Evidence for this dull fear-mongering was notable only for its absence.
Another issue is that, bar a handful of delays and reverses, the campaign clearly isn’t working. Governments have been closing post offices at a rate of 300 a year for two decades despite opposition by Liberal Democrats, Sun readers and viral campaign songs.
And while anti-post office closure campaigners may be able to produce the occasional 4-million signature petition, it is not evidently top of mind as a criteria for voting outside local elections – although even here we are somewhat short of actual evidence as to where PO campaigns rank amongst the main drivers of local voting preference.
The standard argument in favour of not KOing the PO (beyond an excuse for activity), is that these ‘vital hubs’ are ‘central to our community’. Or, as our campaign says, “Post offices are the lifeblood of communities in both rural and urban areas, particularly when they are combined with other services, such as the local shop. When the local post office closes other services often follow suit, which can be devastating for the community.”
Uh-huh… pardon my scepticism, but, after 20 years of closures, where are these “devastated communities” fatally blighted by the absence of their post office? Where are the academic papers or serious pieces of analysis showing this correlation? We are often left instead with opinion polls on the popularity of such services, but these are simply measures of anticipated harm and fear of change, not actual damage.
The reality, I strongly suspect is that our local communities are really quite robust. People, even vulnerable people, adapt or make do.
In respect of social benefit what matters more than the physical infrastructure are the services provided. PostComm, the independent regulator, while recognising that “elderly people, those with disabilities, single parents, the less well off and those without transport” are “most vulnerable” to closures, has recommended alternative ways are found to serve such groups, rather than focusing on physical numbers of offices.
Our party though, despite often having some fairly radical ideas about services, comes across as obsessed with the bricks and mortar…
But this isn’t my main gripe.
What I really don’t understand is why we believe strategically that solutions to PO-closure problems are mainly a matter for national government.
Our national policy paper on this matter ‘Securing Royal Mail and the Post Office‘ has some fine ideas. Within it, the plan for Post Office Ltd. (which runs post offices) would be broadly retention in the public sector with an injection of funding and more flexibility to offer new services. However it never asks the question whether or not post offices are actually the right vehicle for delivering these services.
Nor does it look too hard at issues of control. What I believe would actually ‘save post offices’ is local control over the money, and the power to decide how to use it.
Instead we are proposing what amounts to central planning for a chain of shops with a few public services bolted on. A sort of retail equivalent of the BBC, in the respect that 90% of their services are commercial and could be provided by anyone, but are instead a funded by public subsidy on the dubious, circular argument that public service broadcasting alone isn’t popular enough to justify the BBC. Spending £2bn to make £200m of socially necessary spending more appealing is not exactly prudent.
Worse, and unlike parts of the BBC, the Post Office Network does not have much claim to be a natural monopoly or one that experiences genuine ‘network’ benefits (ie, that each new Post Office adds more social value to the group beyond that provided alone).
Apart from parcel collection most of the social benefits of a post office are local to the geography around it. The main network benefits in postal services do not need post offices. They come from collection (mainly post boxes) and delivery (from postal sorting offices). Further, parcel collection could be provided by any sort of retail outlet. It makes no more sense to have it exclusively in post offices than the monopoly sale of stamps. Similarly the payment of licences, universal benefits or social banking could be provided by any adapted government office or financial services provider.
So if the benefit of the physical structure is primarily local, why not let local communities decide whether they want to fund these structures through local taxation or community funds? Make Post Office Ltd. a small centre of support, training and innovation, not the equivalent of a corporate HQ. Otherwise let local councils empower social entrepreneurs and other providers to get on with delivering the services that are actually needed rather than defending the boxes they are currently packaged in.
Such an approach would also be more consistent with our national public service strategy (the Huhne Commission) that was both provider-neutral and focused on decentralisation, and community politics tradition (concerned with empowering local people). Our current policy, though, is about the state deciding post offices are good for us, and propping them up by subsidy and creating artificial monopolies in some services. Compared to what we’re proposing for Royal Mail it’s an astonishingly backward-looking proposal
That inconsistency though has been driven by our campaigning-style which has wedded us to Post Offices as sacrosanct for tactical convenience. And that in the long-run is the problem. Rather than asking difficult questions like ‘who benefits?’, ‘what is the public need’, and then ‘why save the local post office?’, or ‘what are the alternatives’, we rush to crank the RISO handle. That makes us less Liberal Democrats and more a lobby group for a better yesterday.
And that’s why I find it very hard to get out of bed for a typical ‘Save the local Post Office’ campaign.
* Liberal First is is the pseudonym of a Lib Dem activist in London.
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17 Comments
Is nothing sacred? What next? Potholes don’t matter?
Why are you hiding behind a pseudonym then?
There is a good reason to save what is left of our Post Offices.
In isolation I suppose it would not really matter, but its not. Its part of a larger plan to destroy the very fabric of our rural areas, the destruction of our farming communities, more and more regulation of land, removing the centers of village life, dehumanising pubs and village halls, and the post offices are just part of that.
http://thejournal.parker-joseph.co.uk/blog/_archives/2007/4/1/2851478.html
this will give you a better idea of what I mean, and it is worth protecting, because it is the European ideal to dismantle England, to turn England into small easily manipulated homogeneous regions of Europe.
2 – Colin, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a party member to want to float controversial thinking via a pseudonym. Using their real name would have guaranteed local opposition attacks where they live saying ‘Top Lib Dem attacks post offices’ or similar.
It’s unusual for LDV to publish articles under a pseudonym, and not something we intend to make a habit of. But it seems a reasonable price to pay for encouraging articles which intelligently challenge party orthodoxies.
4 – Stephen, can we assume the name of the author is known to you and is a bona fide member. I would distrust an article that was submitted anonymously.
5 – happy to give that guarantee. Pseudonyms are very occasionally allowed if there’s a strikingly good reason; LDV wouldn’t publish an article without knowing the identity of the author.
I think there’s a lot of sense in here. It isn’t that Post Offices aren’t often valuable or worth saving but the idea that we need a central government plan seems to go against one of the major planks of our party.
Good on Cowley Street for providing good campaigning materials for local parties to mount a professional and informed campaign to save what is often a valuable local service – I know from personal experince that a Post Office is much more central to a rural community than to an urbanised one and in such places we ought to be trying to keep them open.
Finally, if we do believe that Post Offices are something we should be “saving” wholesale – and if something is popular but threatened it makes sense to look at it – we should be doing so by making them more efficient, letting them do more jobs and generally finding ways of building the business so that it is no longer necessary to close so many, rather than proposing the wholly illiberal policy of pouring more and more good money after bad in subsidising a failing state industry.
If the move to Smiths refers to Streatham, then I understand the problem is that the old PO had 8 counters and the new one will have 3. The queues are long in many post offices, and so that is an issue.
More generally, tho’, I agree. Rather than campaigning to keep post offices open – at taxpayers’ expense – we should ask whether PO services could not be handled more cheaply and conveniently elsewhere. I realise that some pensioners prefer to get cash each week, so why not let any shop cash the pension voucher? Tesco etc already give cash back at the till, and I am sure that they and many others (in exchange for a small fee from govt) would be prepared do this. Small shops, newsagents, places like Chinese take-aways often take in huge amounts of notes and coins, and then too may well be prepared to do this. Why not have your local launderette, or even a pub, as a pension paying point?
Why is it still illegal for shops to sell the full range of stamps? Are there any PO services that could not be liberalised?
Tim
Personally I’m quite proud of getting 10,000+ signatures on a petition against a post office closing which was, ultimately, doomed. There will always be political debate over local services, and we ought to be in it (preferably leading it) rather than holding our noses.
I’m not sure that LF’s proposal is actually inconsistent with our campaigning style. We are happy to call for more local control over healthcare, education and taxation, and I don’t see why local control over post offices should be any less Focus-worthy.
Post Offices do provide a valuable service but it tends to be to those who are relatively voiceless in politics: benefit claimants, pensioners, small businesses who don’t run their own mailrooms, and people who persist in preferring to fill in paper forms or send presents they’ve wrapped themselves rather than do it all online… These are also the folk who might find it hardest to travel further afield to a different post office branch. For example, a small bookshop in Islington, where the owner used to be able to pop to the subpost office next door to bank money or post orders now has to shut for half a day at a time to do the same.
LibDems, even the wired ones on LDV, ought to have some sympathy with that constituency.
Benjamin is absolutely right about putting more business the Post Office’s way. Central government has shifted services away from the post office which is one of the reasons for the financial pressures to reduce the number of post office counters. Islington, like other Lib Dem councils, has tried to support post offices (and improve services to residents) by allowing the payment of council charges, rent, etc at the post office.
In Islington we have lost a dozen sub-post offices in as many years; now some of the Crown Post Offices which were designated to pick up their custom are also under threat of closure or at best franchising out. I have no ideological problem with franchising if the quality controls are in place – after all subpost offices are franchises – but the point about Crown Offices is that they provide a constant, full-time service even if the market means that the franchised offices operate on a reduced schedule.
The Post Office commitment (to urban areas at least )is to ensure that everyone is no more than 1 mile from a post office. That is the sort of national standard which is meaningless in inner city areas. While in many rural areas a post office every mile would be a dramatic expansion of the network, in inner London a mile away might as well be on the moon. It’s probably already in another borough.
Labour MPs – who have voted enthusiastically for the Post Office ‘network restructuring’ at every opportunity – seem to be happy for their most vulnerable constituents to ‘go the extra mile’ for the post office. I don’t think we should fall in with them.
Labour MPs are not enthusiastic about Post Office closures and have at times received assurances e.g. on urban network that have not been delivered on.
But in real life times do change, needs do change, services need to change, and in real life budgets need to balance and priorities. Every desire cannot always be met.
I accept that and I’ve been named in Hansard for valiant post office campaigns. In fact the particular office referred to shut only because Mr Khan wanted to quit.
LDs like old Leech are still falsely claiming that Blair closed it with his own bare hands (slight exaggeration).
Bridget’s idea that a mile away is more of a problem in cities really does tickle me. A mile is a mile is a mile. Or that a Post Office being in another Borough is a problem? The one Post Office Manchester Labour managed to save last time round WAS in another borough (in Trafford) but that doesn’t mean it’s not 50 yards away from Mcr residents and half a mile from my house. If we want to have Post Offices as community centres like pubs, libraries and swimming pools – which is fair enough if the demand is there – we need to fund them in a different way than by a national company required to be competitive. Or put them into pubs, libraries and swiomming pools. Or council offices. And yes Tescos, WH Smith, Co-ops etc. Why not?
Having done technical studies for the Post Office at various times over the last 15 years, I’m well aware of the lack of innovative drive in its management. But it has also been shackled by the failure of central govt to understand how to fund development. A lose-lose scenario. It just does not make commercial sense to have a counter assistant spend 2 minutes selling a 50p or thereabouts stamp to a customer who puts a packet on the scale and then takes ages to get the money out – we have to find another way to provide that essential service, and that needs imagination. (Sorry I’m hiding under half my name, but we still have a dumbing down environment that denigrates expertise.)
A mile? A single mile? Where has this come from? For Cumbria, yes, hills, lakes, sheep, and an MP, it is 3miles! I tried to get as a volunteer one of the ladies in our village from the over 60′s to be driven for 3 miles and then told to walk back (we don’t tend to have things called buses in rural areas) in order to see how long it would take. There was no-one to take up the challenge, and of course 3miles to the Post Office would mean 3 miles back!
But the real problem is that these are not just economic outlets, much more importantly they are hubs of social networks in those communities (yes, the “c” word) where people still recognise, ask after, and share themselves with their neighbours.
Then there is Post Office Ltd (POL)….Adam Crozier had problems making Premier League Football successful, so how he got the £1m per annum prize I’ll never know. Well, POL have refused to engage with Councils and LGA, and are going to bounce their nominations for closure with a short, 3-month “consultation”, it stinks.
So this is sticking up for individuals against big state, or big business, finding that what will be proposed isn’t equitable, and saying “enough”. Obviously can’t speak for others, but that seems to me to be a good enough reason for LibDems to be shouting; signing petitions; or whatever. I am sure that others may have a differing perspective, and I will hear.
If the Royal Mail tried to be efficient in managing its outlets we could maintain a local network far more cost effectively.
The problem is the central costs of Royal Mail and an attempt by government to stop cash payments.
If the so-called “last mile” is to be deregulated and opened up to competition, is there any mileage in having Post Offices offer services for other operators as another revenue stream? Or operating as agents for people like FedEx and UPS – they have a decent number of offices in London but elsewhere I doubt they have anything like the penetration of the PO.
Thank-you for the comments, some of which I feel highlight the issue that concerns the article:
IanP correctly identifies the salience of PO campaigns in rural areas, where I believe these campaigns first started. I agree he might have a point, my solution though would be to let Rural areas decide if that is how they want to spend some of the money currently managed by Post Office Counters.
Bridget on the other hand lives in Islington where no one is ever likely to be very far away from some small shop or government office. She seems to suggest any challenge to PO orthodoxy is an attack on vulnerable groups.
I think that’s an error. The division in thinking on this issue is not between those who want to serve the vulnerable and those who’d like the weak to go to the wall, it’s about how you do it and how well you do it.
Bridget’s answer involves tinkering with the structure of Post Office Ltd., rather than thinking more creatively about service delivery aligned to need. It’s as though when asked the question ‘how do we improve life expectancy?’ the question carries an unwritten sub-clause that says ‘by the way you’re only allowed to do this through the NHS, otherwise we can’t put it on a Focus Leaflet and attack the government, so it doesn’t matter’
The rest of her post unsurprisingly, and that from John, then concerns the commercial viability of the Post Office.
Having not really considered whether or not the PO should be viable they want to rig the law and markets to make it so. Possibly then wasting billions on unnecessary interventions that damage the viability of other organisations purely so the necessary social services that might only cost a few hundred million can be delivered in the same packaging they are delivered in today. Those billions in turn could have been used for targeted need-based services for the vulnerable.
Public sector conservatism, in the name of helping the vulnerable, can have precisely the opposite of the intended effect.