Government to discuss handing ownership of Post Office to its operators
The government is to meet representatives of post office operators this week to discuss the possibility of handing them ownership of the Post Office.
The move follows a chastening few months for the government and the network after historical scandals – frequently described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history” – caught the public imagination with the broadcast of ITV’s drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
More than 700 post office operators were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting, because of faulty accounting software installed in the late 1990s.
On Wednesday, the business minister, Kevin Hollinrake, will meet union officials as well as representatives from Britain’s cooperative movement. They will rekindle the proposal to take the Post Office out of government ownership and hand it to the network’s branch managers, who run its 11,500 outlets.
Sean Hudson, the Communication
Workers Union’s branch secretary for post office operators, who will attend the meeting, said: “The meeting was at our request. The possibility of mutualisation was enshrined in the 2012 legislation [separating the Post Office from Royal Mail], so was an option then and remains an option now.
“Mutualisation ranks fairly highly in terms of a preferred option, it will pass power to the members of the mutual, who among others would be the subpostmasters – who are … the heart and soul of the Post Office. What we do know is that the current Post Office model is broken and that an urgent fix is needed. A sticking-plaster solution isn’t appropriate.”
Other figures due to attend are Rose Marley, chief executive of Cooperatives UK, a national body for member-owned organisations, and Richard Trinder, chair of the Voice of the Postmaster, according to the news service Bloomberg, which first reported
the meeting.
The Department for Business and Trade, which oversees the Post Office, previously supported transferring the business to its workers when it split off and privatised the mail delivery arm, Royal Mail, in 2013.
In July 2012, Norman Lamb, minister for employment relations, consumer and postal affairs, wrote: “I want clear progress to have been made towards mutualisation of the Post Office by the end of this parliament.”
Mutualisation did not go ahead at the time; the government argued that the Post Office needed to be made more commercially viable. However, the possibility of future mutualisation was created in its 2011 Postal Services Act.
The Department for Business and Trade did not comment on the meeting, but is understood to be sticking to its position that mutualisation would be appropriate only when the Post Office is financially sustainable.