{"id":162,"date":"2006-10-18T08:29:09","date_gmt":"2006-10-18T07:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=162"},"modified":"2006-10-18T08:29:09","modified_gmt":"2006-10-18T07:29:09","slug":"the-rural-post-office-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=162","title":{"rendered":"The rural post office network"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nfsp.org.uk\/latest_news.asp\">National Federation of Subpostmasters<\/a> is organising a rally at Westminister Central Hall and a mass lobbying of MPs, as well as presenting to 10 Downing Street a petition signed by 4 million people. What&#8217;s it all about?<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s about the future of the rural post office network. We still have around 14,300 post offices nationwide &#8211; well down on the figure of 21,300 some 20 years ago. Almost 8,000 of these are in rural areas and 90% of them lose money and only continue thanks to a government subsidy of \u00a3150M that is due to end in 18 months time.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ll be at the rally all morning on behalf of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.postwatch.co.uk\/custinfo\/CustInfo.asp?id=9\">Postwatch<\/a>, the consumer watchdog for postal services, and I gave an interview on the subject at 12.30 am last night to BBC&#8217;s Radio Five Live. Both the NFSP and Postwatch want a clear government statement on the role, size and funding of the network with proper consultation on the policy and individual closures.<br \/>\nFootnote: I went along to the NFSP rally simply to sit on the stage, since the Postwatch speaker &#8211; our chair Millie Banerjee &#8211; could be there only for her actual speech. However, the programme ran ahead of itself and I was asked to address the rally to fill in some time. Also I gave a lunchtime interview to BBC News 24 and another interview to BBC Radio Five Live about 6.15 pm. That makes 34 media interviews for Postwatch since I joined in April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today the National Federation of Subpostmasters is organising a rally at Westminister Central Hall and a mass lobbying of MPs, as well as presenting to 10 Downing Street a petition signed by 4 million people. What&#8217;s it all about? It&#8217;s about the future of the rural post office network. We still have around 14,300 post [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}