With Post Office closures in the news again (though strangely none of the Post Offices in the Palace of Westminster are facing the axe…) I’ve seen a few people ask, “but is it worth campaigning against the closure of my local Post Office? Don’t closures always go ahead?”
So here’s a reminder of why campaigning is worthwhile and how you can save a Post Office:
AGAINST all odds, defiant campaigners have helped save the Connaught Road Post Office in Harborough from being axed.
A leaked document seen by The Mail revealed Post Office bosses were to announce at 10am on Friday that the branch had been given a reprieve.
Never-say-die protesters from across Harborough have campaigned for months to convince them that the popular Connaught Road branch should be saved. (Harborough Mail)
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22 Comments
How should a LibDem decide when it is right to close a Post Office? Or is it never right to do so?
Bishop Hill, post offices and schools in rural areas should be subsidised because they have such great value in cementing true communities. It would be a terrible mistake to let them run down on grounds of “economy”.
Although I am more economically liberal than many, I don’t believe in some ideologically-driven obsession with the market.
Asquith
So no rural post office should ever be closed down. Ever?
I’m just wondering whether there would still be a branch of the PO on St Kilda if you were running it! 😉
OK, maybe there is a call for some post offices to be closed. But the rate of closure is too high, and some people have got the wrong priorities.
The same goes for rural schools.
Right, so back to my original question – what criteria should be used to make the decision? Call me a market fundamentalist, but at least “it doesn’t make a profit any longer” is rational.
I don’t know what the criterion should be, but I know it shouldn’t be profit-making. It should be a service, like transport. In my humble opinion, there are limits to rationalism.
Well, if there are limits to rationalism but it’s the only option on the table I suggest we stick with it. I assume emotion or other irrational methods are not an option?
I suppose we could do it through the political process, and close POs in opposition constitutencies while maintaining them in government ones.
Perhaps not. The market it is then.
As an urbanite, I have to take issue with asquith’s comment “rural areas should be subsidised” – it’s true in many very urban areas too.
I have never seen the residents of my area as exercised as they are by the suggestion that Wilton Way PO should shut – we’ve got hundreds of signatures on the petition (www.hackneylibdems.org.uk/wiltonway) and a very sizable number of posters in windows.
The argument may be different in that it is half a mile to the next PO rather than ten, but the closure of Wilton Way will cause as many problems in our community as that of a rural office. The fact of the matter is that the main office on Mare Street is so crowded as it is that it is nigh on impossible to use, and if all the surrounding Post Offices are closed, then it will become absolutely impractical to make use of the Post Office for the whole area. It’s also in an area with very significant numbers of the very elderly (there is a lot of sheltered accomodation) and parents of small children who don’t want to leave the relative safety of their area and face the volumes of traffic and troublemakers on the main roads. The loss of the post office would probably also kill off the other useful local shops adjoining it.
I can’t imagine that Wilton Way in particular needs subsidy – it’s busy enough that it usually has a queue out the door – but certainly there are other offices under threat in the area which it would be worth subsidising to keep the main offices flowing and protect our other small shops.
We have to look at the overall benefits of having an office in an area, rural or urban, and I am sure that when the value to local people not only of the Postal Service, but also the other shops that often cluster round them when making these decisions. I have no doubt that people would be happy to see these offices subsidised. I can’t see anything irrational about that.
Nobody ever said that managing a state monopoly was meant to be easy.
This whole discussion of criteria, rationality etc is very interesting. Aren’t we a worthy bunch of people? We spend all our time as liberals arguing for people being allowed to make their own choices and express their opinions – at what point are we allowed to start acting like “ordinary” citizens with preferences of our own? 😉
My post office is under threat, and to be honest I’ve no idea whether it’s really needed by vulnerable groups or whether the big PO up the road can comfortably take the extra business or not… But i’m certain it will inconvenience *me* if it closes. There does come a point, I think, at which taking this balanced, broad political view about everything is counter-productive, because if you decide that there is no rational objection to a PO closing and stifle your objections, you’re artificially affecting the number of voices that would act to save it.
Of course, we regular party members are lucky that we can afford to drop the broad rational view and consider our own interests. Unlike, er, the five Labour MPs campaigning to save their own POs for example 😀
Echoing Alix and Eastender, the battle to save Essex Road Post Office in Islington is one that’s certainly aroused real passion here. It’s a busy Crown office, purpose-built with disabled access, that was the designated alternative for 3 of the sub-post offices closed under the previous ‘network restructuring’ round three years ago.
Local small businesses of which there is a real cluster around Essex Road are particularly angry about the closure because it will take so much more time out of their working day to trek to another Crown office, much further away and with much longer queues.
Essex Road Post Office is always very busy with a varied customer base; if the Post Office can’t make it operate commercially – and if that is the main criterion for closure – then no post office is safe.
Alix
But the point is, precisely, that the whole system is run on an entirely irrational basis – namely a state monopoly.
It’s irrational because there’s no way of telling whether your busy local PO is actually viable or not. Post Offices’ inefficient use of their retail space is legendary. Perhaps someone else could do better? We’ll never know because we have a state monopoly (which AFAIK is supported by the LibDems). If the PO says it’s unviable, then we’ll just have to take their word for it.
So by all means protest if it makes you feel better, but don’t kid yourself that it’s going to make a difference. And ask yourself why you never have to take to the streets when a greengrocers closes.
Except … people do protest against the closure of local shops like greengrocers, such as when you have a protest against a new out-of-town supermarket because, amongst other things, it will drive out of business shops on that local high street.
The same arguments about protecting a local sense of community and local services that do not require large journeys are deployed in these cases too.
We also see the same long term damage to the economic viability of high streets – with an economic cost too in the long run – when local businesses other than Post Offices are driven out of business.
Errr ever heard of EU directive 2002/39/EC? The closure of Post Offices is all linked to the fact that the Royal mail is not allowed to have a monopoly on small items like letters anymore. Interestingly, Royal mail are not able to enter Germany or Holland’s market in retrun because they have laws forbidding it.
As someone who hardly ever goes to a post office and wouldn’t notice if the local one closed, I find the whole issue a bit odd. I certainly can’t imagine caring enough about it to campaign to keep it open and I would be greatly annoyed to think that I was paying to subsidise something that I don’t use.
That said, it appears that in most cases lots of people do care, which means that one of the following must be true:
1) The people who ‘care’ do so by expressing an opinion, but not by taking any direct action such as, say, actually using the post office more often, thus making it more profitable. If they care about a service that they don’t use then they’re being irrational and deserve to be ignored.
2) People do use these services, but the post office network is operated in such a way that nobody really keeps track of these things. Thus, a decision is taken to cut the number of post offices in order to lower costs, but the decision over which post offices to close is taken almost randomly, certainly not based on profit or turnover. Thus, popular post offices might close even if they have a genuine loyal customer base.
The problem is that it’s downright impossible for anyone to know. Each case is different, and can’t possibly be decided centrally. Perhaps in some cases, the post office should downsize somewhat, cutting out unnecessary and unprofitable parts of its business (I’ve noticed that quite a few post offices have made half-baked efforts at becoming convenience stores, with the effect that they simply become both poor post offices and poor convenience stores, for example). In other cases, the post office might be perfectly profitable and can continue to function or even expand. And in some cases, subsidy might be required, and a proper assessment of this can be made on a case-by-case basis.
Of course, I can’t rule out the possibility that this is what already happens, and people are still complaining anyway. If not, it seems like a perfectly good example of the need for decentralisation; treat each post office as an individual unit, allowing its management to figure out the best way of remaining viable, and where that’s impossible, consider subsidy based on the needs of the local community.
Mark
I think you’ll find that they’re protesting against the opening of a new supermarket, rather than the closure of the greengrocer. That would be a bit like saying to the poor owner, “Sorry mate, you’ve got to keep absorbing those losses, otherwise we might have to go to Tesco”. Which would be a bit ridiculous really.
Should we demand “viable high streets” when the majority have voted with their feet and gone to Tesco? Are high streets so important that we should toss our liberalism aside in order to keep them?
And I wonder what criteria you think we should be using, if not economic viability?
Well I am pretty certain our local Post Office was shut purely because the Sub Post Mistress was due to retire and so the post Office would not have to pay her any redundancy money unlike the other two nearest Post Offices. This left a Post Office about 5 minutes walk from a Crown Post Office open which unsuprisingly is now under threat of closure as well.
If that’s the kind of logic in closures that ‘market forces’ makes they can stick it
Market forces wee the argument for slave labour and the current argument for exploitation and pollution on a global scale. British communities need a meeting place, whether the local pub, post office or local shop. Surely, a few post offices open would help aid social cohesion, otherwise hundreds of older people living on their own would have no reason to go out. No-one would then notice if they were ill or even died. What a sad society we must live in.
I meant were (typo)
To save your local post office, see the Post Office’s own website where you can add your comments and make your voices heard where it possibly could make a difference. The PO are trying to gauge the level of support for all post office’s: those which are earmarked for closure and those which are not.