Watchdog ups stakes over post office closures

The postal regulator has stepped up pressure on the government over rural post office closures by rebuking it for delay and short-termism.

Nigel Stapleton, chairman of Postcomm, which has an advisory role to the government on the post office network, said yesterday on a visit to Scotland it would be publishing a major report next month. “It will be hard-hitting,” he said.

MPs and MSPs were already putting pressure on the government to ensure it was “an issue they can’t dodge”, he said, adding: “The problem is that by having left it as long as it has been left to produce a solution, the solution will be more difficult and probably more costly than if there had been a little more thinking at an earlier stage.” He said a government consultation had been promised before the summer, then put off until the autumn. “It is a continually slipping clock,” he said.

Royal Mail has said a strictly commercial network would mean axing over 10,000 post offices out of the current 14,500 when the GBP150m annual subsidy runs out in 18 months’ time.

Mr Stapleton said: “Hopefully that is a scare number to get the government to face things.”

He said government departments had cut off key sources of post office income, most recently the switch of the TV licence contract to Paypoint. “There was a marginal cost saving to government in the move to an alternative provider. But when the savings are added up, I am sure they will be inconsequential compared with the amount of money that will probably be needed to secure a network which properly reflects the social needs of communities for access to postal services.”

Mr Stapleton’s visit included a trip in the mobile post office being successfully trialled at Wick. “If you compare the initiatives and projects we have undertaken in the UK with international experience, we haven’t really started to be innovative,” he said.

Scottish pilot projects had been running at most for two years, but “the lack of viability of the rural network has been pretty obvious for substantially longer than that”.

He said rural offices would benefit from being able to handle parcels carried by Royal Mail’s new competitors, but Royal Mail saw that only as a threat.