6,000 post offices face being sold off
Secret plan to axe half of network, say campaigners
THOUSANDS of post offices face being sold or axed under secret plans to streamline the scandalhit business, it is claimed.
Campaigners believe bosses want to offload up to 6,000 lossmaking branches – over half the network – and turn the Post Office into a John Lewis-style “mutual” company run by staff.
The shock move would help draw a line under the IT fiasco that saw thousands of subpostmasters wrongly accused of stealing from their branches.
It has left the taxpayer with a bill of up to £1billion in compensation and legal fees and the Post Office looking for new ways to secure its future.
Ex-postmistress Sally Stringer, giving evidence at the public inquiry into the scandal, said she was left stunned when officials discussed scaling down the stateowned network.
During mediation talks with other workers, one executive told them: “Well, of course, we will only have 5,000 offices when we mutualise.” She said: “I looked at her and said, ‘Really? You’ve got 11,000 offices now, so you’re going to reduce by 6,000 offices…’”
Ms Stringer, who ran a post office in Beckford, Gloucs, for 20 years, told the inquiry such closures would be “fundamentally and utterly wrong”.
Plans to mutualise the PO were proposed nearly a decade ago but the idea was dropped.
Mark Baker, of the Communication Workers Union, thinks the PO wants to give postmasters a share in its ownership. But he says this would only work if it ditched unprofitable branches and the Government ran them like a local library service.
He said: “You wouldn’t get much resistance from postmasters if full compensation was paid. But customers would be very upset.”
The Government has said it is committed to maintaining the 11,500-branch network at its current level across the UK.
The Post Office said: “Our network of 11,500 branches has been stable for the last decade and we’ve seen a net growth in our network of 181 branches between the end of March 2021 and December 2021 alone.”