Turning POs into mini-banks will not happen till after GE

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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Turning post offices into mini-banks will not happen until after election, Government says

Lord Mandelson's plans to turn post offices into mini-banks have no chance of being implemented until after next year’s general election, it has been claimed.

Business Secretary Lord Mandelson yesterday announced he wanted to post offices to offer customers five new kinds of bank accounts.

But the small print of the Government's consultation showed there was no chance of the proposals being implemented before the likely date of the general election, the Conservatives said.

t said: “A Government response will be published within three months of the close of the consultation” on 24 February 2010.

That would mean that any response could be as late as the end of May - when a general election is likely to be held at the beginning of that month.

Ken Clarke, the shadow Business secretary, said: “This is a last-minute attempt to patch up the damage Labour has done to the post office network after 12 years of neglect.

“Despite Gordon Brown’s promise of reform in his conference speech, he has kicked plans for desperately-needed change into the long grass until after the general election."

Mr Clarke also claimed the proposals were "uncosted" because the consultation said any new products had to be “affordable and at least cost neutral in the medium- to long-term”.

Unions and sub-postmasters accused the Government of missing an opportunity to provide a fully-fledged “People’s Bank” based at the 11,500 post office branches across the country.

The Communication Workers Union said the announcement was “limited”, adding that most of the details outlined in a consultation were already in the pipeline.

Last month a report from a committee of MPs criticised the Government for driving through the programme, ignoring the “distress and upheaval” caused by the closures in local communities.

[headscrewedon]

What a bunch of incompetent twits we have had over the last few decades of government. The Post Office used to bloody well have a banking network ....

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Girobank was a British financial institution founded in 1968. It started life as the National Giro but went through several name changes: National Girobank and, finally, Girobank Plc, before becoming Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank.
Established by the General Post Office, it was bought by Alliance & Leicester Group, which was subsequently acquired by the Spanish banking group Santander.

The organisation chalked up notable firsts. It was the first bank designed with computerised operations in mind; the first bank in Europe to adopt OCR (optical character recognition) technology[1]; the first UK bank to offer free accounts to individuals; and the first bank in Europe to offer telephone banking, beating the much trumpeted First Direct service by several years. It is widely credited for shaking up the UK banking market, forcing competitors to innovate and respond to the needs of the mass market, before some short-termist pillock sold it off. (OK, that last bit was my comment)

In the 1960s, although most towns had one or more bank branches, smaller communities very often had no bank branch at all. Post Offices, on the other hand were just about in every community. There used to be about 22,000 Post Offices in the UK compared to about 3,000 bank branches. The Post Office was ideally placed to establish a viable mass banking system.


Sound familiar ?

[postietaz]

wernt it this goverment that shut em god elp us :mfo