9:03am Thursday 7th August 2008
By Peter Luff
ON August 27 we will know which post offices in our area have been earmarked for closure. As we get close to that dreaded date, it is important to do two things – to understand what we can do about the closures and to dispel some of the myths about why they are happening.
The government has decided that we need to shrink the size of the network by 2,500 post offices. This is because the network has lost a lot of business, largely due to the Government’s decision to force pensioners and benefit claimants to have their money paid into bank accounts rather than collecting them in cash. Also, to be fair, many of us now go on-line to do things such as pay car tax that we used to do in a post office.
The closures could have been avoided if the Post Office itself had been quicker off the mark in looking for new business and if the Government hadn’t undermined its finances so recklessly. But we are where we are and, on average, between four and six post offices are likely to close in each district council area.
Any campaign that succeeds in saving one post office during the six-week consultation will lead to another being closed somewhere else – the Government has decreed that 2,500 must close overall. So, as we campaign to save one office, we must remember we will be endangering another. It’s a pretty unpleasant situation.
We need to be clear – the closures are exclusively a product of policy decisions taken here in the UK. The nonsense that has appeared in some letters in this paper that the EU is to blame is just that – nonsense.
All Europe has done is to approve, on the terms requested by the UK Government, the subsidy, or state aid, for the network.
There have to be state aid rules to prevent, for example, the French or Italian governments from unfairly subsidising businesses which compete with our own. Most tellingly, post office closures are not happening in the rest of Europe – and in Ireland they are opening up more.
Alan Cook, managing director of the Post Office, emphatically told my select committee on June 10 this year, when asked if there was any link with EU directives and commission decisions: “No. There is no link.”
I think he should know better than anyone else what the facts are.
When Worcestershire’s closures are announced on August 27, blame Blair and Brown, not Brussels!
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/trade_directory/