Petition calls on Co-op to keep backing post office

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A PETITION calling on Co-op chiefs not to close Swadlincote Post Office has been signed by 1,700 people in just four hours.

Supporters backed the campaign after it was set up by Swadlincote Chamber of Trade following Tamworth Co-operative Society’s admission it may close the service and a clothes store, located in the same building on The Delph.

“We have had a tremendous surge of support to keep our post office,” said chamber vice-chairman John Burnton.

“We did not even have to ask them to sign. They just started filling it out straight away.

“It only goes to prove we have such a close-knit community and that we want to have a post office in the town centre.” The chamber organised the petition after the Co-op admitted it may close the businesses because they had accrued ‘significant’ annual losses and were subsidised by more successful parts of the company — a situation they indicated was unsustainable.

Co-op bosses were yesterday holding crunch talks with staff before deciding whether or not to pull out, a move which would force customers, many of them elderly, to travel to post offices in Newhall, Woodville and Moira.

The chamber, led by Derbyshire county and South Derbyshire district councillor Pat Murray, has said the Co-op would be ‘irresponsible’ to close the service and that its public duty to keep the post office open ‘is more important than its bottom line’ — points which underpin the petition.

“The post office is part of the community,” said Mr Burnton. “It’s a tremendous place for pensioners to go and get their pensions and it’s something the community needs.”

The vice-chairman and the five other chamber committee members collected the signatures during two-hour sessions on Friday and Saturday on The Delph.

Copies of the petition were also available in members’ shops.

The chamber intends to present the petition, entitled ‘Save our Post Office’ to the Co-op and will hold a meeting later this week to plan its next move.

The Co-op has stressed it is a business and not a public body, and needs to consider the interests of the company as a whole.

However, it said it had demonstrated its public duty by continuing to run the post office despite incurring heavy losses for years.

It said it would continue to show its public spiritedness by ‘doing its utmost to help maintain an alternative service’ if it decided to pull out.