Gordon Prentice - Pendle's Campaigning Labour MP
| Post Office Closures in Lancashire |
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Tags: Campaign | Parliament | Post Office
| Written by Gordon Prentice |
| Tuesday, 04 March 2008 00:00 |
 Westminster Hall debate initiated by Lindsay Hoyle MPMr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle) (Lab): It is, as always, a delight to follow my friend from Chorley (Mr. Hoyle), who made his case well. He speaks with great authority as he is a member of the Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Committee. Mr. Hoyle: The BERRC. Mr. Prentice: The BERRC. It has just produced a report on the post office closure programme. Like everyone else, I am dismayed by what is happening because the post office is part of the fabric of urban and rural life. When post offices close, it will virtually be impossible to recreate the network. About 10 or 20 years ago, it was fashionable to get rid of parkies—park keepers. Parks and public spaces became no-go areas. Now everyone is talking about reclaiming public space and the park keepers are coming back because people have realised that the wrong decision was made years ago. Similarly, in recent years, there have been proposals to close police stations. The police told us that no one visited police station x in a little village in the middle of nowhere, but they did not realise that police stations are hugely symbolic. People see them as a place of refuge; they are part of the warp of our life and we need such institutions. If such a thing has not been recognised by the Post Office and others, it has been recognised by our local newspapers in east Lancashire—Pendle lies in the east of the county and 500,000 people live there. The case has been championed by the Lancashire Telegraph, which had the front page headline, “Doomed: quarter of East Lanc’s post offices to close”. It also had photographs of all the post offices. Over the following weeks, there have been stories underlining how the closures will personally affect people. The Carr Hall post office is in my constituency of Pendle. A local newspaper article says that Tom Lees’s 20-minute trip to the post office could soon take him nearly five times as long, because the Post Office wants to close his local post office at Carr Hall. He tells the paper that he has worked out that if the post office is closed, it will take him one hour and 37 minutes to get to the alternative post office that has been identified. Another article has the headline “Hands off our sub post offices” and there is a photograph of my colleague the Member for Burnley (Kitty Ussher), who is championing the cause of the post offices under threat next door to my area. Other headlines include “Protestors vow to fight closure plans” and “Death of village!” Villagers in Higham have vowed to save their local post office. That article quotes Debi Archer, the postmistress, who took over the premises almost two years ago, as saying that the post office and shop form the heart of the community and that if they were taken away, the community would die. “Post office closure fury” is a headline from Barnoldswick, the town where I live. The article states: “Barnoldswick Town Council has condemned the Post Office’s plans to close its office in Gisburn Road”. Barnoldswick is a town of 12,000 people. It has two post offices, so if the Gisburn road post office goes, it will have one post office for 12,000 people. Would someone from Post Office Ltd explain to me the rationale for that? No wonder people are infuriated. I am sure that the Bishop of Blackburn does not do fury—[Interruption.] Well, perhaps he does in his private moments. He is, in his ecclesiastical way, upset. He said to the local paper: “It is vital that this review process is a genuine consultation, not just a cosmetic public relations exercise to rubber-stamp business plans”,and continued in that vein. The Lancashire Telegraph editorial picks up that theme, citing the Post Office’s response to people who have been handing in petitions. My friend from Hyndburn (Mr. Pope) talked about the post office in his neck of the woods, where 800 people signed a petition. The Telegraph editorial says that the Post Office has been giving the impression that those petitions do not carry much weight. It goes on to say that the consultation is a sham. That is the issue. We are marching people up to the top of the hill. We are giving them the impression that, through petitions and letters, they can change the result. Mr. Pope: Is my hon. Friend aware that when the Lancashire Telegraph went to the headquarters of Post Office Ltd to hand in a petition, nobody came out even to accept it? Is that not a disgrace? Mr. Prentice: That is appalling. It genuinely shocks me to hear that people who would have spent a long time getting names for the petition should have been sent away with a flea in their ear, without even seeing someone to hand their petition over. That is, as my friend says, an absolute disgrace. Let me return to the question of the consultation, because that is central. I should perhaps have said earlier that I wrote to all the postmasters of the post offices threatened with closure in my constituency—there are six of them. Let me say this in parentheses. When I was first elected as the MP for Pendle in 1992, there were 28 post offices. We have already lost 10. The proposal is that we lose another six, so we will be left with 12 post offices out of the 28 that I inherited. Of course, that is not something that started in 1992; it has happened under Administrations of all colours. According to the House of Commons Library note on post office numbers, there were 22,405 post offices in 1981-82, but now the number is down to just over 14,000. The Post Office and the Government want to get it down to about 11,500 and I think that the Select Committee has concurred with that. There has been a steady and relentless decline in the number of post offices throughout the nation year in, year out, but the rate of closures has been accelerating. Since the late 1990s, the net change has increased dramatically. In 2002, there were 345 closures and there were 262 closures in 2001, but in 2003-04, the number shot up to 1,278. In 2004-05, there were 1,352 closures. There has been a falling back since then, but the programme has been accelerating. We do not need to be a mastermind to understand the pressures on the post office network. The banks have been vacating the high streets. The internet is now ubiquitous, and people pay their utility bills and so on via the internet. We have heard about TV licences. People can renew their car tax online. We have to recognise and accept that the context in which post offices are doing business has changed almost out of all recognition over recent years. As Lenin would say, “What is to be done?” Mr. Clifton-Brown: A change of Government. Mr. Prentice: Let me say this to the Conservatives. I do not want to hear them saying, “We will keep the post office network at its present size,” unless they really mean it and will put the subsidies into it. Do the Conservatives want to see the post office network with 11,500 post offices, or at a level—I think that the Minister referred to this in his evidence to the Select Committee—at which only commercially viable post offices would exist, which would be about 4,000? When the Conservatives give commitments, as they do, to keep profitable post offices, are they talking about that bare minimum of 4,000? If not, how much subsidy will they put into the network? As I said in my opening remarks, I believe that the post office network is a social good and that it should be subsidised. We subsidise all sorts of things. We subsidise nuclear power stations, for God’s sake. My friend from Chorley is shaking his head, so I think that we will carry on this discussion after the debate. Within the constraints of the competition rules of the European Union—I have to raise that this week, of all weeks—we should subsidise our post offices and we should make it clear to the people who use those post offices what the public subsidy is. It is not just to the individual Post Office, but to clusters of post offices. If we did that, people would realise how much public money is going in to keep those post offices alive. I very much hope that we can have some lateral thinking from the Post Office and the Government to keep this essential part of our social fabric in existence. |
| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 07 October 2008 17:19 ) |