Possible rural Post Office closures

[Psamathe]

... we also need to be practical in looking at the importance on a case by case basis. ...

I can't help thinking that there's a bit of a contradiction here. Looking at this properly rather than using a mixture of the market and political expediency would be likely to cost more than providing post offices willy-nilly across the land. It would need a royal commission to settle the correct procedure to be followed before any initial decisions were made.

I don't think it needs to be excessively costly to look at properly (given the ongoing subsidy until in 3 years time there is another call to reduce subsidy). Just make every subsidised Post Office carry out a study identifying e.g. distance to nearest alternative food shop, distance to nearest bus stop, population within 1 mile, etc. Design some points based system defining e.g. "stop subsidy (e.g. main Post Office with half a mile)", "questionable (look into special factors) and "definitely maintain subside". There must be experts who can design something to collect appropriate data to reduce the number of "questionable" cases.

You could require input/research by the shop itself and through the Parish Council. Really a means to reduce the numbers that require looking into in more detail. So in my case, the village shop/Post Office would probably have fallen into the "stop subsidy" automatically due to nearby town, low close population served (and if you can't walk it a few extra miles impacts only a few but they'd have to travel that extra distance for e.g. food).

We either continue subsidy forever or stop it completely or reduce it and the only sensible way to reduce it is to look at it in more detail. If we need to reduce it then we need to make sure those limited funds are being spent to best effect and not going to places that really don't need or justify it.

Ian

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
I cycle to the doctors to hand deliver my monthly prescription.
I then a week later do the same to pick it up, this is by choice as part of my rides.

Today a driver in van is delivering a prescription to my neighbour, if they are not in then they come back, there must be wasted wasteful costs there and the drivers are all old One even leaves the door open and engine running whilst he goes to door
I am sure that when they employed the driver he was well checked......................

Royal Mail / other delivers often to my house the porch door is always unlocked and a notice to that effect, many parcels are left when I am not there, they will leave parcel even tho sig is needed but I am happy so far.
A delivery driver delived next door and no one in so left parcel next to bins, not sure that's wise.

In the end you have to move with the times, I rarely use cash at all, simpler to do all that stuff at midnight in front of computer.
I speak to my doctors but rarely see them, its works for me.
I use online groceries often but I do shop weekly by car.

I have had a thought that a system that works via phone line be put in houses that are not that well connected, it could be simple interface where goods services cold be ordered and you have a big post box that will accept larger stuff on your premises.
One truck etc delivering all that stuff to your door has to be the way to go.

A user friendly electronic interface could be a boon for isolated places and isolated people with a good touch screen which also incorporates a Skype service, the list is endless, does it exist ....Why not...............am I being too idealistic?

Edited.
Oh our local post office is possibly closing, they reckon that they have not made a profit since they moved in twenty years ago, poor one stop shop that's changed hands many times is considering taking over the PO services in the shop.

Three shops other is hair dressers ( I believe all run by retired/ well off people who can afford it) all run down and not that well used by me and the rest of village?

Knock it all down and build a centre to sit shop and pass the time collect stuff if needed etc

[thirdcrank]

The motor car largely replaced Central Place Theory with what I'll dub Parking Space Theory; that is in turn being rapidly replaced by Cyber Space Theory. One result is that there's very limited economic demand for post offices, especially rural post offices, just like stabling for the mail coach horses and boozers ever eight miles or so to refresh the drovers et al.

The times, they are a changin'.....

[axel_knutt]

Why use post offices?

To send a letter by recorded delivery.

[thirdcrank]

I certainly think it's important that things like the registered letter service need to be properly thought out, not least because a lot of the users of such services will be dealing with govt departments.

An example of what I'm thinking about was the demise of the telegram service. It was probably always doomed but this from wiki gives an idea of the speed of its collapse, without suggesting why it occurred:

By the 1960s the number of telegrams being delivered had dropped to 10 million, and in 1976 only 844 were delivered

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_messenger

IMO, the crunch came with the 1971 postal strike, which lasted some six weeks but in my memory seemed a lot longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Unit ... ers_strike

A large part of the telegram service and more besides was dumped on the police in a totally ad hoc way. It didn't take long for everybody to twig that getting the police to do your running round (in their nice new panda cars) was immeasurably cheaper at point-of-sale than a telegram, even if the true cost was higher. To the hierarchy, it was all good public relations, to the lowerarchy not everybody had the confidence to suggest sending a telegram so it just carried on when the strike was over. Inevitably, it couldn't continue and increased car ownership, more private phones and eventually mobile phones reduced the demand but there was nothing organised about the demise of the telegram service

[Tangled Metal]

Why use post offices?

To send a letter by recorded delivery.

Just let market forces dictate how many survive. Should profitable branches fund less profitable? We're a small island and for most of UK you're likely to be relatively near to a larger settlement that it's probably able to support a P O.

How many recorded deliveries get made in these subsidized rural POs? Worth keeping open for them?

Put it this way, a city like Lancaster has lost it's main post office. The only one in the city centre is on the main one way road around the centre. It's a very small post office too. Why on earth should we provide villages with a subsidized post office for a very small level of population?

Perhaps they should bite the bullet and shut a load down and put the money into a traveling post office. I've seen a traveling.bank before and it served a wide area up in the highlands and islands. Made sense to me.

[Psamathe]

Royal Mail are changing and adapting to new technology

In a bold move which merges technology with tradition, the Post Office has launched its new Internet service with the firm promise that all emails will be delivered the day after sending.

‘In launching our ISP, we are capturing the quintessential qualities that the public has come to recognise from a nationalised provider,’ said Managing Director, David Smith. ‘We are so confident of our service that I can categorically say that even if your email is sent after 5:30pm, we guarantee its delivery the following day, if not first thing in the morning, certainly by lunchtime. Well let’s say teatime just to be on the safe side. That is, of course, provided that the next day is not a Sunday or a public holiday.’

Ian

[mjr]

What's the unionization level in post office ltd? Royal mail has a union problem in some depots, I just wondered about unions in the post office.

What do you mean by "union problem"? As I understand it, Royal Mail has very healthy (high) union membership levels among its workers.

The overriding reason for the decline in the traditional GPO stuff is that it is, well, declining post office stuff. Things that used to be done over-the-counter are increasingly done on line etc. Much of the stuff that requires a physical presence such as parcel collection doesn't need a pillar of society so places like filling stations will do.

As "traditional GPO stuff" declined, post offices have filled that cap by offering new services, including banking and so on.

If filling stations were competent at handling parcels, they wouldn't be sprouting locked security boxes on the sides for parcel drop-offs/pick-ups - sets of security boxes which take up more space than a village post office counter and charge a higher premium fee if you want to use them!

It seems to me, however, that a lot of the noise is made by people who have deliberately chosen to live in rural areas as a lifestyle choice, so displacing many of those with a genuine reason to live there but without the money to do so.

Oh [inappropriate word removed]. I've lived in villages and small towns all my life except for a few years at university. I moved back because it makes sense to me in various ways. Even if it was "a lifestyle choice", why should our way of life be destroyed by government directing yet another rapidly-vanishing public service to duplicate services in large towns and cities already offered by the private sector instead?

Cashpoints - I always considered that they should be services provided by the banks to allow you to access your money (and save the need for more expensive cashiers/ counters, etc.) and allowing customers of any bank becomes a reciprocal arrangement. Maybe a failing becomes that 3rd parties see it as a profitable business and maybe planners should guard against this when granting permission for these machines (e.g. no charges). Could be that the failing there is our drive to ever more profitable capitalism.

Could be, but that horse has bolted. Even if it were possible to introduce such planning conditions now, the situation is that the default for rural cash machines is high fees and changing that could well cost more than the £80m/year cost to the government of the network of 11,500 post offices and it would still end a lot of other services like handling of various government forms.

People argue that rural Post Offices are necessary e.g. for Pensioners to collect their pension and to keep the local village shops in business. But are we subsidising pensioners getting their cash or subsidising local village shops. If it's keeping local village shops in business why do we only subsidise those with Post Offices ? Why not all village shops?

We do effectively subsidise all of them: many use the Post Office for their banking, rather than bear the extra costs of using a bank in town. This one small subsidy does so much good. It's £80m/year. The nation gave Vodafone an estimated £600m/year off its taxes, so it should be able to find a fraction of that for this very useful public service.

Interestingly, my postal delivery can't get e.g. a signature because I'm out they didn't leave the item at my local village shop Post Office (1 mile away) but at the bigger Post Office (in a bigger shop) in the local town 3 miles away

Well, that sounds bonkers! Any idea why they do it?

I don't think it needs to be excessively costly to look at properly (given the ongoing subsidy until in 3 years time there is another call to reduce subsidy). Just make every subsidised Post Office carry out a study identifying e.g. distance to nearest alternative food shop, distance to nearest bus stop, population within 1 mile, etc. Design some points based system defining e.g. "stop subsidy (e.g. main Post Office with half a mile)", "questionable (look into special factors) and "definitely maintain subside". There must be experts who can design something to collect appropriate data to reduce the number of "questionable" cases.

They did that last time. The current criteria are in the consultation document. Nevertheless, it led to absurdities and now they're considering making it even more restrictive.

Look at my village: so it's got a few bus stops - they don't connect with basic public services (I can get a bus to our doctors, but it'll be an hour's walk home again afterwards). There are other food shops beside the post office in the next village, but the one next door offers complementary products (and has no spare shelf space) and the ones that compete are roadside seasonal smallholding stalls, but that's the sort of thing that some townie would write down as "distance to nearest alternative food shop: 20m; distance to nearest bus stop: 100m" without noting how it doesn't replace the post office and then they close it. That's roughly what happened in the last village where I lived, which may have been within ~2 miles of the next post office, but that was at the foot of the other side of a 25% hill with no footways along the road, with no direct bus service to it. The nearest reasonably-walkable-in-all-weather post office was maybe 5 miles.

There is one heck of a risk of doing another Beeching here and cutting the network too far.

(and if you can't walk it a few extra miles impacts only a few but they'd have to travel that extra distance for e.g. food).

So, basically, the government should give up and just let the edge-of-town big box motorist-priority stores rape the villages like they have most towns?

I cycle to the doctors to hand deliver my monthly prescription.
I then a week later do the same to pick it up, this is by choice as part of my rides.

I order mine online, but then I cycle to pick it up. You could argue it's my choice, but that's because the other choices seem worse, like motoring there and clogging up car park spaces presumably needed by people who can't cycle due to illness or disability. It's sometimes a detour on the way to the train station or combined with a shopping trip. I think they have a van but I've never been offered delivery - I expect they have their rounds full with people who are too ill to travel at all.

A user friendly electronic interface could be a boon for isolated places and isolated people with a good touch screen which also incorporates a Skype service, the list is endless, does it exist ....Why not...............am I being too idealistic?

Because rural broadband is still a flaming joke and barely able to support video calling. The Superfast Broadband Programme has cost £1.7bn which I think is over two years - the same amount would have continued the Post Office subsidy at its current level for over twenty! I'm hoping that the regulator carries through the long-overdue cutting of the BT retail+wholesale tie and that could means services improve, but it could take years. It should have been done in the 1990s, at the start of ADSL.

Just let market forces dictate how many survive. Should profitable branches fund less profitable? We're a small island and for most of UK you're likely to be relatively near to a larger settlement that it's probably able to support a P O.

It depends how you define "near". I'd like to see a Post Office within easy cycling distance (3 miles) of 99% of the population and 95% of rural population. Otherwise, too many people are being encouraged too strongly to drive to access basic government services IMO. Happily, those are the current criteria (even if mindless application of them led to a few stupid decisions), so we should defend them!

Put it this way, a city like Lancaster has lost it's main post office. The only one in the city centre is on the main one way road around the centre. It's a very small post office too. Why on earth should we provide villages with a subsidized post office for a very small level of population?

Alternative, why on earth should we provide cities like Lancaster with a subsidised post office to duplicate services which can be offered by the private sector there?

Actually, Lancaster's is very likely a Crown Post Office. They work on a very different model to rural sub offices and seem horrendously mismanaged to me.

And of course, there is also a scope for a lot of accounting trickery between the parts of Post Office Ltd (Crown or sub, urban or rural) and between Post Office and Royal Mail in how you make different bits appear profitable or loss-making.

Perhaps they should bite the bullet and shut a load down and put the money into a traveling post office. I've seen a traveling.bank before and it served a wide area up in the highlands and islands. Made sense to me.

I fear it would go like the mobile libraries. I used to use the mobile libraries. They stopped every fortnight in the same place and if that stop had a noticeboard (not all do), then the times were on it. It worked brilliantly IMO and I was rarely the only user. Then they changed it and now I think it's some alternating three-week schedule and only advertised somewhere on the usability disaster zone of a website. Actually, I just checked: apparently it's changed back to one schedule but reduced further to 4-weekly but our stop is now the only one in the village (which is a mile long and we're at one end of it!), is only ten minutes long (arrive early or no browsing, I guess), is on Tuesdays (which is market day in the nearest town) and skips December. Does that sounds to anyone else like they're deliberately trying to deter users?

[Psamathe]

...

(and if you can't walk it a few extra miles impacts only a few but they'd have to travel that extra distance for e.g. food).

:eek: So, basically, the government should give up and just let the edge-of-town big box motorist-priority stores rape the villages like they have most towns?...

This is where it has to be looked at on a case by case basis. In my case the nearest Post Office (town with Library, Supermarket, bakers, etc. those facilities are in the middle of the town - so people with limited transport would need to go into that town anyway (for e.g. food). But it won't always be the case (so different places wold justify different levels of subsidy).

I do think we need to protect our services but also I feel that we need to adapt those services to changes in the way things are working. It is not simply a matter of keeping the same services that were needed many years ago. A bit of thought about why and what alternatives could be provided (does not mean that I have the answers but I doubt the answers will always be "keep doing what we've been doing for years" for all places).

Ian

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
Put the kettle on first Did not have time to read all of it.

[mjr]

I do think we need to protect our services but also I feel that we need to adapt those services to changes in the way things are working. It is not simply a matter of keeping the same services that were needed many years ago.

It's not "many years ago". It's less than ten years since the criteria were changed and consequentially there was a huge cull of rural community post office counters. The subsidy is now relatively small compared to loads of other subsidies to private supposedly commercially-viable businesses, so I really don't understand the apparent opposition to it on this forum.

[The utility cyclist]

I have 4 post offices within 2 miles in all directions and 7 within 3 miles and I live in a town of 50k with a smaller town adjacent. the village PO was taken over some years ago when the sub-postmaster monies were slashed but it was up in the air if it would survive.
So far it has, it's now opened up to have materials, toys and all sorts of stuff and the couple who have bought the house that the PO is part of seem to do okay if not raking it in.
There's a very popular gastro pub next door where the nobs take tiffin and it can be a bit of a rat run at rush hour plus getting into the town centre can be a drag in car as parking is very limited near the newsagents that is now the main PO (our 7 counter main PO closed about 8 years ago).
We don't have an open police station however nearby, nearest one is 7 miles away, bit of a drag when you want to actually need to sort issues out that go beyond phone calls and a dopey/inadequate PC visit especially when it comes to motorists doing their usual

[Tangled Metal]

What's the unionization level in post office ltd? Royal mail has a union problem in some depots, I just wondered about unions in the post office.

What do you mean by "union problem"? As I understand it, Royal Mail has very healthy (high) union membership levels among its workers.

That's the problem right there! I've got a few postie friends (make friends with one and before long you collect a few more of their colleagues as friends). All union members...not by choice! Illegal to have closed shops but some sorting offices manage it.

Then you get the tail wagging the dog. Then the better managers move away to other depots, leaving incompetence at management level being led by the nose by the union members.

A few of my.mates moved away to another town after 40 years living there and 15+ years working as a postie there to escape what the union members were doing.

If you ever befriend a postie you will hear some very unbelievable stories about royal mail and parcel farce. If the post office Ltd is similar then no wonder branches close, even bigger ones like Lancaster.

[ambodach]

I moved to my relatively remote area to work many years ago now.My job oversaw another 14 jobs which were new to the area. When I retired I continued to live here. Why should I move away somewhere now strange to me ? I expect to die and be buried here. If our PO shut down the nearest largish town is 2 hours away each way by car or bus. Not useable. Our library service was changed to a mobile library and the timings and books available seemed to be made as unattractive as possible to deter users and so gave and excuse to close it down. I have relatively good broadband service but not everyone has and I do not do Internet banking as we still have a local Clydesdale Bank and a visiting Bank of Scotland. One not very good food shop but in emergency I would not starve. There are indeed quite a few well off retires here but the emphasis has changed. When I came here the island was known as " The Officers Mess" due to the numbers of retired Colonels,Admirals etc. You can take " mess " any way you like.

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
Internet shopping fantastic, but the parcels are still delivered the old way by the old team, OK.
Internet banking, mostly you have to do nothing, occasional phone call / email.
Internet groceries, least fuss for the same stuff you buy week in week out.
Doctors phone consultation, got to be efficient some of the time.
If I see something I want and the price is right I will buy partly for the convenience.

Do we need shops, of course for when you are out and need to buy, I am anywhere on my bike camping and I need stuff.

As I said up post if we want to save our local shop then turn it into a multi shop / café / whatever.
I know people find it hard to grasp new technology, but they are missing so much.
Old institutions have dragged their heels for to long.

We need to move on, I don't get the spend in your local for a less than modern universal service.
There are plenty derelict ruins on Dartmoor of coach houses and stables, we have cars today.
"Psamathe" always puts it well.