“For Cornwall, the Post Office ‘Network Change’ programme fails to make a convincing case for the closure of forty-nine Post Offices (and a further thirteen to be replaced by mobile outreach) through what it does not say as much as what it does.
‘Access’ appears to be the key criteria by which decisions are being taken. Access to public transport is a key part of this (although in many cases the Post Office are unable to illustrate any/regular disabled access to buses – an obvious point that the County Council would support) but not – curiously – access to a car. The Post Office notes the percentage of those who ‘own’ a car or van within a mile of where the branch is but (again) what we do not know is whether this is a topographical or road travel mile and what manipulation of the 2001 census or other data has been used to arrive at the presented figures: therefore, how to challenge them?
There is certainly no evaluation in the Post Office Area Plan of the number of people with limiting long term illness and/or disabilities. To cut a long story short, Cornwall has many people with these issues: access and how to access services are key issues for them.
In any event; many country routes for walking, wheelchairs or buggies to alternative Post Offices suffer from poor visibility or heavy traffic. Indeed, in one case the police had to advise that a local protest did not go ahead along precisely such a route that was the most direct to an alternative branch.
Strange, then, that the major rationale behind national mass closure has been the alleged lack of use and subsequent taxpayer support rather than customer base. The Change Programme talks about ‘customer sessions’ but the Post Office have admitted to us that each session could be anything from the purchase of one second class stamp through to parcels and banking conducted by one customer. Quality of transaction is not covered and data subject to ‘commercial confidence’. Further, the area report for Cornwall states that a further ten percent of the network has been saved because of access issues, apparently regardless of profitability. The Post Office has indicated that anything less than one thousand customer sessions per week is unlikely to make a profit; yet there are Post Offices with numbers exceeding this earmarked for closure.
In such a climate it is very difficult for a local authority, the voluntary sector and/or a potential new private investor to know what action to take in response to individually named closures; especially if the closure wheels have been set in motion through earmarked closures and financial recompense secretly decided earlier in the year, as business and market information is not shared. A plank of the County Council’s request for ‘judicial review’ is that closure is being decided before alternatives, and that where customers and staff of these Post Offices know what is going on they will walk away, leaving them to a slow and lingering demise through to the completion of this exercise at Christmas.
In terms of outreach alternatives; time, money and partnerships need to be worked up in order to be able to develop and deliver these. This cannot be done by the end of the consultation period (which incidentally coincides with the busy high summer season for Cornish businesses). It is disingenuous for the Plan to indicate that outreach could bring the benefit of the card account and retail boost when these are respectively out to tender and where the link between Post Office and retail facility is being potentially being broken in a number of instances.
Mobile alternatives – in thirteen cases- are ironically the type of service which is earmarked for closure in some areas (and replacement with an alternative form of outreach) and where there is very poor evidence of ‘customer sessions’ (in some cases less than fifty per week). They are proposed to be located away from where the current fixed service is cited (sometimes up a hill) and can only accommodate a few customers at a time, leaving others in the queue to the elements. There is no evidence that these thirteen alternatives would be financially sustainable beyond any short term support package and (together with the other forty-nine closures) represent a closure programme of some 22% of the Cornish network. This is the highest rate of closure of any area announced so far, and far more than any comparative area.
Then again, the Post Office has presented a case for challenge through a poorly researched and presented Cornwall plan. The population of the county was over-stated by 200,000, it was stated that there are only four larger towns, the location and functionality of the tourism industry was inaccurately and poorly illustrated, a new settlement was mooted not where we had said it was possibly going to be and Cornwall also apparently now had Dartmoor and the Isles of Scilly within its boundaries! This stunning and basic catalogue of inaccuracies on which to base a serious report on the future of a business network is unacceptable to the County Council and the communities of Cornwall.”
