Closure to Royal Mail centre could affect the Vale says MP

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A CLOSURE of Worcester's main mail centre could affect large parts of rural Worcestershire including the Vale, Evesham's MP has warned.
Peter Luff has urged Royal Mail chiefs to be very careful about protecting mail services in the county after it was announced the area's main sorting office was under review.
The Wainwright Road centre currently employs 188 members of staff who could be offered jobs elsewhere in the company or face redundancy if the company decides to close it.
Royal Mail estimates the amount of mail being sent in the region to half by 2014 compared to 2006, and the amount of post being handled by the company to shrink by a quarter because of the increase in electronic communication such as email.
This, coupled with the extra competition faced by the company, has led it to put its sorting offices in Birmingham, Wolverhampton Leicester, Northampton, Derby, Nottingham and the Worcester office under review.
The six month review will assess how many offices the region needs, with closures and mergers a possible outcome.
Mr Luff has now written to Royal Mail chiefs and said any recommendation to close the Worcester mail centre would only be acceptable with a cast iron guarantee that any replacement would be just as good.
"I am concerned you are looking at this issue on a regional basis and it may well be that there is greater capacity to align the service provided by our mail centre in Worcester with those in the South West," he added in his letter.
"Of course Royal Mail faces real challenges with declining mail volumes, but to draw artificial regional boundaries and to ignore the close relationship of rural Worcestershire with that of rural Gloucestershire, would be a serious mistake."
Royal Mail spokesperson Heulyn Gwyn Davies said: "Within the shrinking postal market, we are losing share to rival operators which now carry more than one in three letters and more than half of all business mail in the UK.
"While these letters are still delivered by Royal Mail’s postmen and women, much of the collection and regional processing activity undertaken by our large processing sites is now done by competitors and the amount done by Royal Mail has dramatically reduced."
The review is set to take six months with a final decision expected by the summer.