Tag: Royal Mail

The Post Office played down speculation that half of the 560 directly owned, high street post offices could close and said relocation and franchising would help to stem the network’s losses. The state-owned group has been reviewing its Crown Offices and said that a significant number of the branches were not viable. Between 320 and 390 of its branches could support themselves, it said. The Post Office rents most of its Crown Office properties, and soaring rental costs have contributed to losses of about Pounds 70m a year. But the Post Office said yesterday that many uneconomic branches would be kept open for strategic reasons. “We need to be in the best locations, where the customers are, on the high street and in the shopping centres. If there are closures it will be very few,” it said.

Royal Mail is preparing to close or sell up to half its high street post offices as part of a sweeping restructuring, The Times has learnt. The company operates 560 Crown offices but is planning to shut between 240 to 270 in a move that would leave hundreds of thousands of people without easy access to basic services. It is currently losing GBP70 million a year, and managers insist that the losses are unsustainable. Critics have accused Royal Mail of asset stripping in an attempt to raise profits. Many of the post offices that could be sold are in prime locations and would command millions of pounds on the property market. The sales will provoke public anger but could provide the beleaguered business with a cash injection. Royal Mail has told unions that the main post office network must be reduced to between 320 and 390 branches to be viable.

Britain’s network of sub post offices is in “serious danger of extinction”, the Government was warned today. The National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) said that urgent Government action was now needed to prevent the network sinking into terminal decline. The federation today set out its proposals to revitalise the system in a manifesto, launched at Westminster with the backing of the all-party post offices group of MPs. It called for a one-off cash injection of GBP150 million for the urban network to produce “bigger, better and brighter” post offices, while drawing up a programme by 2008 to develop the “optimum, viable rural network”. It said the current level of Government support for was doing no more than “prop up” an “ailing” rural network and that start-up cash was need for refurbishment and the ongoing provision of social and economic services.