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Post Office Closures

We learned three weeks ago how many closures Somerset would face. The figures are very clear: in the present Somerset county council area, 30 will close, with another seven downgraded; in the historic county of Somerset, a further 18 will close, making a total of 55 closures across Somerset. Anyone who wants to know what villages are involved could find them in my early-day motion 1036. I shall concentrate on the seven direct closures in my constituency—in Bayford, Bower Hinton, Holcombe, Keinton Mandeville, Kingsdon, Sparkford and Yeovilton—and two that will be replaced by a van service in Charlton Horethorne and North Cadbury. I feel that I have been fighting the same campaign for 20 or more years—in the House, previously as a county councillor or before that as someone involved in local community politics. It seems to me that we are seeing a constant reduction in the post office network. I know that there were 3,500 closures under the Conservative Government, but I think that the main reason for that was neglect. Now it is happening by design: we are deliberately closing down large parts of the rural post office network. I hear Labour Members talk of the ““stability”” of the network. It is a strange sort of stability that closes 6,500 sub-post offices. At medical school I used to be told that there was a difference between stability and morbidity. What the Government are proposing is the stability of a corpse. Through a process of bullying and moving business away from post offices, they have created circumstances in which they can say that those post offices are not profitable and must be closed down. I thought that we had won the battle for rural post offices back in 2002. How wrong I was—that was only a temporary lull before the storm that we now face. We know from what has happened so far that public opinion is not enough. We can collect all the signatures that we like. Four million people signed a petition against post office closures, but it did not mean a thing. We can organise local petitions—every parish council in my constituency signed a petition that I presented to the House—and they do not mean a thing. All our local petitions and letters do not mean a thing, because the Government have decreed that the closures will go ahead. I do not think the Government understand why we fight so strongly for local post offices. There are all the social reasons which we have heard already today. We have heard about the people who do not have the comfortable option of getting into their second Volvo to drive to the next town because they do not have that second Volvo, or even the first, and could not drive it if they had it because they are elderly or infirm. Those people cannot find a substitute for the local post office. They do not want their money to be paid into a bank account, because they have never worked on the basis of a bank account. I think the yuppie Ministers have forgotten that there are people in this country who still budget on a week-by-week basis with cash in hand. That is the way those people want to stay, and they need their sub-post offices. There is, for instance, the community aspect of post offices. The post office is the centre of many village communities, and in many instances it is all that we have left. It is not just postal services that are affected, but all the other activities that are centred on the post office, which is often the last shop in the village. I have been considering the effect of the planned closures in my constituency. As a result of the closure in Bower Hinton, people will have to walk two to three miles to Martock, down a steep hill which they will have to climb up when they return. The post office is the last shop in Bower Hinton, so that is in danger as well. When those people arrive in Martock they will find a very successful little post office, but one with permanent queues which is unable to provide any further capacity. Where is the logic in that? Where, moreover, is the environmental logic? We are supposed to have a joined-up Government who take the environment seriously. Where is the environmental logic in people having to drive for miles to reach a post office? Holcombe has sheltered housing directly opposite the post office, but apparently Post Office Ltd was not aware of it. The post office has always provided a prescription service for the local surgery, and that too will go. As for Kingsdon, I went to a public meeting there at 9 o'clock on Saturday morning. More than 100 people were there; practically everyone on the village had gone to make their point. They were irate, because one of the things that the Post Office had said in the letter it had sent was that there was an alternative in Yeovilton. There are two problems with that alternative. First, it is on the royal naval air station base. People could not get past the two large Marines with machine guns at the gates, but even if they could, Yeovilton is one of the other post offices that are due to close, so it is not a great alternative. Charlton Horthorne and North Cadbury have been offered a van alternative. Vans are great—I would love to see mobile post offices dealing with many of the communities that have already lost their post offices—but the problem is that there is no commitment beyond three years, so we will lose our permanent post offices in return for the promise of a mobile service that may disappear. We have six weeks in which to make all those points, and we have been told that we will not have a result at the end of that period because of local elections. As we are not due to have any local elections in Somerset, we understand perfectly well that this is another example of the Government trying to cover their backs. The key issue is whether we regard post offices purely as commercial undertakings or as a public service. I regard them as a public service. When I hear people say that a particular post office has a small number of customers, I think that for those people it is an essential service, and it does not matter that they live in the country rather than, as would be convenient, in a big city. They should have access to the services that they need. When I am told that post offices have to make a profit, I wonder whether that will soon apply to our schools, roads and our military involvement in Basra. Must they make a profit, or else be closed down? Perhaps we should look at those post offices as a genuine people's post office. What an insult to run that campaign, when the post office is anything but the people's post office. It is the Minister's plaything, and it provides a profit for Post Office Ltd. We do not ask for much in our rural areas, but we rely on our village hall, our village school, our village shop and our village post office. I do not think that is too much to ask, and we should keep those post offices open as a genuine people's post office and a service for the people of this country.