Post offices are the beating heart of towns and villages across Britain. To let them go is a shameful betrayal

NOT so very long ago, the local post office was a feature of thriving shopping streets all across Britain.

As a little girl, I remember popping in to our local branch two or three times a week.

I would go hand-in-hand with my mum to pick up her family allowance, stopping on the way back to spend some of the money on a bag of peppermint creams.

There would be a second weekly trip with my grandad to collect his pension — and chat with his friends in the queue — along with extra visits to send a parcel, buy stamps or a ball of string.

Nowadays, of course, family allowance is called child benefit and busy parents don’t have to stamp a book over the counter to collect it — they have their money paid direct into their bank accounts, as do most pensioners.

And the post office, which like the pub or the village green has been a part of the fabric of British life for so long, is an endangered species.

Brink

The decline over the past five decades is startling. The number of post office branches has fallen from 25,000 in the mid-Sixties to around 11,500 today. Those numbers are likely to plummet further, with around 2,500 small outlets expected to close in the next 12 months.

Indeed, the National Federation of SubPostmasters — representing those who run the vast majority of the post offices around the country — will warn MPs today that the entire network is on the brink of imploding because they simply cannot keep their heads above water.

This is nothing less than a desperate social crisis. Post offices are the beating heart of towns and villages across Britain, providing essential services and a place for people to meet and chat.

Alarmingly, around 3,000 of those that remain are the only shop left in their village. If they d i s a p p e a r, then the community will lose something that will be very difficult to replace.

Realistically, some of them are unlikely ever to be profitable, but they have a social value in many ways beyond price. Bereft of their post office, with no corner shop, no cafe and no pub, villages can easily stop being warm and friendly and become atomised dormitories where neighbours rarely meet.

This grave problem has arisen partly because of changes in technology. Routine chores we used to do at the post office, such as obtaining passports and driving licences, we can now do online.

Once-lucrative streams of revenue for post offices have also been drying up. Income from road tax payments, for example, has shrunk dramatically since paper discs on windscreens were abolished.

Despite these changes, the Post Office company that manages the network has made a profit for the past two years. The problem? It hasn’t filtered down to many of the independent sub-postmasters.

Their income overall fell by £17 million to £371 million in 2017/18. Many of them, after years or even decades at the counter, now despair of ever being able to run a viable business, and a shocking three out of four earn less than the minimum wage, according to a survey by the Federation.

This is especially galling because, in recent years, post offices have taken on a range of services on behalf of the banks, which have themselves shut down thousands of branches in a move that saves them tens of millions of pounds.

In 2017, Post Office bosses signed a deal with the banks to provide basic financial services, such as allowing small business to pay in and take out cash and to provide account balances, hoping that this would help to restore incomes. Critics suspect, however, that the banks fleeced them in the negotiations because, whatever deal was struck — and it was kept secret for commercial reasons — sub-postmasters say it is not working fairly for them.

They claim they are receiving too little for each transaction they carry out, and that the extra financial services income is nowhere near enough to keep their businesses in the black.

It would be an utter disgrace if small post offices which have traditionally provided a lifeline for their community are being made to suffer as a result of the greed of our big banks.

The High Street lenders have already closed some 3,500 branches since the financial crisis, depriving local communities and, in particular, the elderly of vital access to cash.

If, on top of this, they have refused to offer a deal which makes it worthwhile for sub-postmasters to step into the void, the banks will be doubly culpable.

And let’s not forget that they have a moral obligation to show responsibility for ordinary people. After all, RBS and Lloyds received tens of billions in bailouts from the taxpayer during the financial crisis.

Scandals

There is no time to waste. They should be made to stump up a levy to keep post offices afloat and to repay part of their debt to society.

The Post Office, whose roots go back to the time of Charles II, is a company that is owned by the government.

It was split off from Royal Mail — which delivers the letters and parcels — in 2012.

That might tempt some to wonder whether the best solution to its problems is to privatise it and free the business from the dead hand of the state.

The performance of Royal Mail, which floated on the stockmarket in 2013, suggests not. Its shares have plunged, it is expected to report a huge fall in profits tomorrow and it has been beset by fat- cat pay scandals.

Privatisation is not the answer — the solution lies in the government’s hands. They recognise there is a problem — they just have not done enough to fix it.

Between 2010 and 2017, a socalled ‘transformation programme’ with about £2 billion of government investment has been used to try to modernise post offices, sprucing them up and enabling them to offer longer opening hours.

Vital

But blaming government mismanagement and red tape, the independent sub-postmasters again claim they are not receiving the full benefits of the money, which they would like to see going into new technology, improved infrastructure and better commission rates.

In addition, the government has long paid a subsidy to cover operating costs for the network. But it has dramatically cut this back from £ 130 million in 2015/ 16 to £50 million by 2021.

The cut in the subsidy sends out entirely the wrong message. A sub-postmaster weighing up whether to throw in the towel will understandably fear life will only become harder and be more inclined to quit.

I am not normally a fan of propping up any struggling industry. Governments have a duty to use taxpayers’ cash wisely — and why throw good money after bad?

But post offices are a different case. A subsidy would fulfil a vital social function by keeping branches alive. It would cost a fraction of the amount it took to rescue the banks — and, for that matter, of the £14.5 billion a year we expect to pay in foreign aid by 2021.

It would be an unforgiveable betrayal if we lost our post offices. Though it is not too late to save them, ministers have to act now — and show some gumption.