Post Office Ltd offers £20m fund for village post offices

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Britain’s Post Office Ltd has said it will provide a £20m fund to support its network of branches in rural and remote areas.

The state-owned company that oversees the 11,800 post offices in the UK said about 3,400 of those branches are located in places where the post office is the only shop in the community.

Post Office Ltd said these community branches were “critical” with traditional banks reducing the scale of their physical retail networks in the UK, since they provide access to bank accounts along with postal products and services.

The new Community Branch Fund is being provided from the £640m fund the government allocated to Post Office Ltd back in November.

Subpostmasters will have to apply for support from the new fund, stating how the funds will be used to support the long-term sustainability and growth of their business and deliver benefits to customers.

The firm said every community branch will be able to apply to the Fund, and that investment would be allocated on an individual basis

Paula Vennells, the Post Office Ltd chief executive, said the Community Branch Fund was part of the “powerful public purpose” of the business.

“The Community Branch Fund demonstrates our commitment to our customers,” she said. “Where many organisations are withdrawing from communities we are staying put, supporting all our customers wherever they are.”

Card account

The UK’s subpostmasters held their national conference in Harrogate this week, at which fears were expressed over the long-term future of the Post Office card account system.

The system allows 3m people to access their pensions and benefits from post offices.

The National Federation of Subpostmasters said fears were now growing about the future of the service when the Post Office card account contract comes to an end next spring.

It said a leaked report from the government’s Department for Work and Pensions suggested benefit payments would no longer be paid into Post Office card accounts.

The organisation and its members at the conference called on ministers to renew the POCA contract, or announce a successor product.

Terminating the programme would mean a further decline in visitor numbers to the nation’s post offices, the NFSP said. It also said the POCA mechanism delivers cash into thousands of rural communities across the UK, and ending the service could impact on financial inclusion in these areas.

“The POCA continues to underpin the viability of thousands of sub post offices while offering a trusted service to millions of pensions and benefits claimants,” said NFSP general secretary George Thomson.

“Subpostmasters and the three million POCA users urgently need to know what is planned for the end of the contract in March 2015. We cannot risk another period of uncertainty as subpostmasters decide whether to remain in the network and we must have a Post Office-based product that allows people to access pensions and benefits.”