The last two months has been one of the toughest periods of my professional life as I have experienced the wrath of customers faced with the likely closure of their post office in London. Some 169 offices - one in five - is scheduled for closure and I have spoken at many public meetings attended by outraged citizens.
The G2 section of today's "Guardian" has a major feature on post office closures focusing on three particular offices, including one in London on which oddly Postwatch has only received one representation.
I've recently written an article on Postwatch's role in the closure programme with particular reference to my patch of Greater London. I reproduce it below for those who want to go beyond the understandable but simple emotion of the issue.
The postal consumer watchdog has a difficult but crucial role in ensuring that post office closures disadvantage customers as little as possible, explains Roger Darlington, Chairman of the Greater London Region of Postwatch.
POST OFFICE CLOSURE PROGRAMME IN LONDON
Nobody likes to see post offices close. Sadly, however, offices are closing all the time on an unplanned basis. As Government provides services and customers do business in different ways, customer visits to the network have fallen from 28M a week to just 24M and the losses of Post Office Limited (POL) have risen from £100M a year to £200M.
Government has decided that nationwide there will 2,500 compensated closures which will be a reduction of around 18% in the size of the national network. Also there will also be 500 so-called outreach models which, in those rural locations, will offer a limited service.
For the purposes of this closure programme, POL has divided the country into 41 Area Plans based on Parliamentary constituencies. In the case of London, there is a single plan (the 19th and largest) on which consultation started on 19 February and finished on 2 April 2008. Some 169 post offices – one in five – have been proposed for closure. There would still be 681 offices in the capital.
The Postwatch role is as follows:
- Prior to public consultation, we had a three week period to examine and make representations on the draft plan which resulted in 12 changes to the proposals.
- During the six week public consultation, we attended every meeting to which we were invited (almost 30) and studied very carefully all the representations copied to us.
- Now public consultation is over, we are reconsidering our position on the plan in the light of all the representations made, will make further representations to POL, and can appeal against a refusal to accept our objections to particular closures.
- But we have no right of veto over any closure.
The meetings we have attended and the representations we have received often demonstrated powerful and understandable emotions around local closures, but Postwatch will only achieve further changes in the proposals if we can produce convincing evidence that a particular closure will exceptionally disadvantage customers.
So we are making strong representations where we believe that more customer visits can be expected because of local regeneration plans, that the access to the next nearest office is especially difficult, that the next nearest office does not have the capacity to cope with the extra transactions, or that the local economy will be particularly hard hit.
We hope and expect that the Post Office Decision Document on London - expected in May – will show that the views of the public and the representations of Postwatch have brought about further changes to the proposals.
All customers – perhaps especially vulnerable groups like the elderly – will be saddened by the closures, but the alternative is a network that slowly contracts in an unplanned and uneven way. If post offices have to close, then they need to be the ones that will least disadvantage customers and best ensure the future viability of the network.
