Contribution
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) on taking the initiative to secure time for this debate and on the way in which he opened it.
We are all familiar with the old maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I have lost count of the number of post office debates I have taken part in over the years, and it seems to me that as far as post offices are concerned, the maxim that has governed the thinking of Governments of all colours is, “If it ain’t broke, keep reforming it until it is.”
The fundamental problem is that there has been an incoherence of approach within Departments. On the one hand, we have heard—I suspect we may hear similar things from the Minister today—Ministers stand at the Dispatch Box saying that the post office is a brilliant institution and it can be the front office or front desk for Government services in communities across the country. The next day, we will have another Minister standing at the Dispatch Box telling us that access to Government services will become digital by default. Unless we decide exactly what role we expect our post offices to perform in our communities, we cannot be surprised when they fail to thrive and then wither in the way that they are doing.
It is more than 20 years now since the Department for Work and Pensions thought it could save money by driving people away from getting pensions and other benefits from their local post office. Doubtless that was a saving for the Department for Work and Pensions, but it has just meant that the Department for Business and Trade or whatever we call it these days has had to put more money in through Government subsidies. I hesitate to predict the future in politics at all these days, but one day, when we have finally turned the key to lock the last post office in the country, some bright spark in Downing Street somewhere will come up with a policy paper saying that we should have a hub in every community where people can access Government services and meet their postal needs, their banking needs and all the rest of it, and in that way we will end up reinventing what we have reformed to the point of destruction.
The Post Office and how it interacts with the sub-postmasters has not always helped in that respect, including the innovations that it has brought, such as the pick-up and drop-off initiatives. In my constituency, it is not the sub-post offices that are given the contract to do the pick-up and drop-off points. If the Post Office at the heart is not able to support sub-postmasters at the frontline, we frankly cannot be surprised if they start to fail.
In particular, I want to talk about the Post Office’s approach to the closure of Crown branches. We see that in my constituency, where the last Crown post office in Kirkwall is listed for closure. The way that has been done by the Post Office has been nothing short of a disgrace. It has been totally lacking in respect for its employees and the communities that the post office is there to serve. At a time when we might have hoped that the Post Office would want to demonstrate a change of culture—for reasons we have debated often enough—we see it still behaving in this way in my community. It makes me think that all the fine words about changed culture at the top of the Post Office are simply meaningless weasel words.
I have seen similar situations before. We lost the Crown post office in Lerwick in Shetland a few years ago. It was taken out and folded into a local newsagent service. For all the promises given about maintaining services, in fact the community was left with a much inferior service at the end of the day, despite the best efforts of the newsagent who got the contract. If we are to see these changes in Kirkwall, we need to know first of all that the same range of services will still be available as there are from a Crown post office. That includes vehicle licensing, currency exchange and passport checking—all those things should still be available.
Just as important as the range of services is the question of the physical infrastructure. People want a stand-alone post office to offer a level of service of the sort they get with a Crown post office, especially when we are encouraging banking into them. That is a highly personal service for many people. They do not want to be doing that next to somebody buying a tin of beans and their weekly paper. The size and availability of any post office that is to replace the one that the Post Office wants to close in Kirkwall is critical. We do not want people queueing around the block at Christmas when the post office is at its busiest, standing in the rain, sleet and snow to get their postage done. The size, the range of services and the quality of service have to be at the heart of anything that comes from the Post Office by way of revision. That is the basis on which we in my community will be judging any proposals that it comes forward with.