CAPOC Blog

Last Wednesday (2 February 2011) CAPOC was invited to speak at a half day Westminster Forum on “The future of the Royal Mail, Post office and the universal postal service,” in London.

Jim Latham was our speaker and the script agreed between us – it’s reproduced elsewhere on this site – your comments welcomed.

As the morning drew to a close, we tried to give our response to the morning’s proceedings, as the only representatives of the British public present amongst – with a few honourable exceptions – the generally self-centred, mercenary, bunch who made up the delegates to the forum.

Unfortunately, the chair, Nia Griffith MP, didn’t call us at the end of the final session – so here goes anyway:

If any real members of the public had been present, they would have been as horrified as we were at the level of discussion about the future of Royal Mail, Post Office and the universal postal service. If this was representative of what goes on behind the scenes of decision-making about a major British public service, God help us all.

It wasn’t a forum, it was a business-2-business conference where shares in future profits were being divvied up, company CVs were put on display, tenders were being placed with widely varying levels of subtlety, some staggering figures were revealed and those delegates apparently mandated to guard public interest did little to inspire confidence.

And mostly discussed in some kind of code – semantic arts and acronyms clearly figure highly in modern business skills and training.

The CAPOC award for achievement in her sector goes to Susan Barton from EALA Postal Services (part of Accenture – look it up) for her delicacy of approach. Apparently the future of Royal Mail, Post Office and the universal postal service should not concern itself with such distractions as the loss of post office branches and the major social impact this might have. This was simply “bringing emotionalism into the issue.” Unbelievable! The frightening thing was the number of violently nodding heads amongst the audience. We felt as though we should apologise for our presence, simply bow our heads and go on paying our taxes, so that this whole process could proceed without any more tiresome interruptions – they only need £1.34 billion of our money to modernise Post Office Ltd. (£1.34 billion – read it and weep).

We should also say that there was one (private) rebel view at least that a proportion of that £1.34 billion would go on compensating sub-posties, as even more branches close.

Enough abuse. We have to say that there was a certain fascination in observing another culture at work, but we also got a lot more from the session.

Not least, we were approached by Paula Vennells, the MD for POL who says she wants to work with us, we had a very useful chat with Dave Ward, Deputy General Secretary of the CWU and made a potentially very interesting contact with Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

There was more: PostComm’s activities cost Royal Mail £35 million, fascinating detail about the new PO “Essential” and “Local” branches which appear to be flavour of the month (watch this space).

And what about the future? Well, take this as notice that we intend to press for a public consultation on decisions that are about to be taken in our name. It’s simply inconceivable that these figures can be committed and the future of a service so central to the lives of all UK citizens can be adopted without one.

So finally POL have come out with some figures – we have 11,872 Post Offices operating in the UK, still short of the Labour Government’s planned figure of 11,500 – according to a PO spokesman quoted in the Telegraph this morning (25 Nov 10).

33 have closed since the end of April, not the 150 closed this year claimed by the Communications Workers’ Union – POL apparently forgotten to add in all those branches which have been "re-opened" as Outreach.

And that includes “unprofitable” rural branches.

What?!! Say that again.

Are we really saying here that we closed several thousand Post Offices because they were losing money?

Are we really saying that we used the club of a national deficit and selection for closure was random?

We know it was – we were told so by the head of the closure team and it was never stated exactly how much each branch was actually losing.

Are we really saying that we also condemned shops in which the branches were sited to an early death, because they were unable to survive without the dual income and the hearts have been ripped out of thousands of rural communities all over the country as a result?

Are we really saying that we’d rather lose money by providing vans to visit villages a couple of times a week, forcing customers to queue in rain and snow for their stamps and pensions? Because that’s what “re-opened” really means. And how long will they survive?

And are we really saying we’d rather have this than local shops which actually subsidised the PO through their postal services desks?

How many bonuses were paid to the people who successfully achieved their targets in this exercise?
Anyway no need to worry, because Edward Davey, the Postal Services Minister says the new Government is committed to maintaining a network of 11,500 branches (so only another 372 to close) and “they’re determined to break the cycle of decline and protect this tremendous national asset.”

Jesus this takes some believing! What he’s saying is that implicitly he agrees with the Labour Government’s closure programme, because that was exactly their target too. He doesn’t make mention either of the Postal Services Bill currently working its way through Parliament, whose aim is to sell off the PO (to the Dutch or Germans).

No chance then of restoring services like driving or tv licences whose removal hit branch profits and started the whole sorry story. Nah!

None of which will give any satisfaction to Nick Daffern from Cirencester who contacted us with some lovely designs for new “replacement” post office branches.

The truth of the matter is that no free-standing PO branch, unless it’s in a big population centre is going to generate enough income to guarantee self sufficiency. In rural areas the PO branch HAS to be part of another business to provide dual income streams – and the outlay costs so far seem to stretch as far as a table in a corner – or a van.

So, finally it’s official - the consultation over Post Office closures was a sham. Don’t tell me you missed it – didn’t get much space in the nationals, radio or tv this week – about as much as the original closure plans got.

According to “Consumer Focus” POL failed to engage three million people effectively in the consultation. Tell me about it.

Of course they didn’t – that wasn’t their job. Their job – given them by the Government - was to close down branches with as least fuss as possible and they did that supremely well. You can just hear ‘em.

“Tell you what we’ll do, we’ll set a really short deadline for people to object, then we need a big list of criteria for closure – that’ll keep ‘em all busy, then we’ll ignore all that and do what we’re being paid to do, shut the bloody things down and sell it off to the Germans.”

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