The Post Office

This government is as bad as that of Margaret Thatcher and her Conservatives at “selling off the Crown Jewels”, i.e. privatising. Maggie did it openly but “New” Labour is doing it by stealth. Before I retired I was employed in the NHS (i.e. NATIONAL Health Service; now many of our hospitals are privately owned and some of the services are privately run and very much for the worse, not to mention more expensive! I loved the recent story in the news about hospitals in Wales bringing cleaning services in-house again, and what has happened – rates of hospital acquired MRSA have reduced dramatically!

However, this rant is about the Post Office.

The government are closing down many of the rural post offices; while they may have been unprofitable, they are also a lynch-pin of the community. What any community needs to survive is a church, a school, a Post Office, a shop and an inn. Now many of the churches have closed or been amalgamated, and the schools are under threat. People will make their own entertainment at home usually, but remove the local post office and shop (often one and the same place) and the heart has gone.

I live in a town with about 45,000 population and we now have only one post office in the centre of town (where I can never find a parking space.) so if I need to do anything other than drop an item into a post box, I have to make a round trip of about 11 miles, taking about 40 minutes overall in traffic. At least when I get there I have the opportunity to do more as there is also a small Tesco, a coffee shop, a stationers, a Bank and a hairdresser so it is not all bad, but it is not so long since there was a general store with Post Office only ¼ mile away, with a good catchment area and reasonable parking.

What happens when your nearest post office is even further away and you have a very occasional bus service to rely on to get there? It gets worse, though. Already a monopoly of parts of the delivery of mail has been taken away from the Post Office. So what happens? Profitable parts are seized with great joy by competitors, e.g. local business mail in big cities. In fact, the contract for first class delivery of mail from Amazon (worth at least £10 million) has been lost by the Post Office.

So what will happen in rural areas? There will be no Post Office and no doorstep delivery of mail. The “postie” not only delivers mail, but also performs a valuable social service by being the one person who calls regularly at peoples’ homes and who is in a position of noticing if something is wrong.

This was all prompted by the fact that I had to post a packet yesterday morning and so had to drive to a near by small town where I was able to park the car and visit the Post Office and Tesco and got cash out from the Bank. Glad there is a walkway under cover the whole way round the little shopping complex as, once more, the rain started to fall just as soon as I pulled up.