Three rural post offices closed every week

[Geezer]

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Three rural post offices have been closing every week for the past nine years.


Last Updated: 6:38PM GMT 22 Jan 2009
Rural Post Offices under increasing threat of closure, customer walks out of Ponyntzfield Post Office, in Inverness, Scotland.


Royal Mail has admitted to MPs that England has lost one fifth of its entire rural post office network since 2000.

Overall the number of open post offices in England alone has dropped by 29 per cent from 14,292 to 10,324.

Overall rural post office numbers fell by 21 per cent from 6,543 in 2000 to 5,158 by the end of 2008. The decline - 1,385 branches - works out at three a week since 2000.

The number of post offices in towns and cities fell by a third from 7,749 to 5,166 over the same period.

The figures include most of the current round of closures, under the controversial Network Change Programme which will see 2,500 branches being shut.

So far, 2,300 have been closed and the remaining 200 should close for good by March.

Pat McFadden, the post office minister, insisted that the Government was committed to protecting "vulnerable consumers in deprived urban, rural and remote areas".

But Nick Herbert MP, the shadow Environment secretary, said: "Post offices often lie at the heart of rural communities and losses on this scale have been immensely damaging.

"Thousands more people are now more isolated without easy access to important services.

"The Government simply doesn't understand the value of this public service or how such hanges harm rural areas."

George Thomson, the chairman of the National Federation of Sub-Postmasters, added: "When you close a local post office it rips the heart out of the local community. Small businesses in rural areas need their local post office.

"They need access to the mail system. We need a viable and sustainable network.

"The closures of recent years have got to stop. You don't need get a network through wishful thinking."

Last night, Royal Mail said the company only started to shut rural branches in the recent round of closures as part of the Network Change Programme.

Until then, rural branches only closed when the organisation was unable to find a sub-postmaster to replace one who was retiring.

A Government report last month blamed the loss of post offices for a raid decline in rural life with more villages suffering deprivation than three years ago.

The study from the Commission for Rural Communities found that life in remote rural areas had declined faster between 2004 and 2007 than in towns and cities.

The loss of post offices and shops and doctors' surgeries was blamed.

In November the postal regulator warned that thousands more branches could be allowed to close "in an unplanned way'' because 7,500 branches would be enough to satisfy the Government's "access criteria".

This is defined as ensuring that 95 per cent of people in towns and cities are within one mile of a branch. In rural areas the target was three miles.

Earlier this week, it emerged that Royal Mail made profits of £255 million - more than £900,000 a day - in the nine months to Dec 28

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Pat McFadden, the post office minister, insisted that the Government was committed to protecting "vulnerable consumers in deprived urban, rural and remote areas".

That may be right and the criteria you gave to POL and RMG may have been based on that belief. But you gave it to 2 or 3 of the most Market driven Businessmen in the UK, and then offered them a Bonus to meet these and other (hidden?) criteria meaning that they got a bigger bonus the more offices they closed as long as they met those minimum requirements. Anyone see the obvious flaw.

Wonder if PF is having a Homer moment