Crown Post Offices: Franchising

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; that is a story I hear over and over from colleagues around the country. Behind those losses is a loss of spending power in our towns. Over several decades, good jobs have been lost and replaced by minimum-wage, insecure work. Young people have left and there has been a significant loss in the working-age population. The jobs that remain do not pay enough to sustain our local services. We have felt the anger from those areas in recent years, so why do the Government allow this process to continue?

WHSmith employs its staff on part-time contracts at the minimum wage, whereas post office counter staff typically earn £21,000 a year. It matters for the viability of our town centres that people are paid properly, and for the health of our nation that people are treated properly. In my view, this failed economic model was one of the direct causes of the heavy leave vote in constituencies such as mine. It has caused justifiable anger in our towns, so why is that failed economic model being employed?

Surely, if Government mean what they say about listening to those who have been left behind and about trying to reinvigorate our high streets, they must abandon this plan right now and seek an alternative. All the plan means, as the Communication Workers Union puts it, is that post offices are on

“a path of managed decline”.

For the 800 or so staff facing transfer or redundancy, I suspect that this will be the final straw. The vast majority of staff who faced franchising were not subject to the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 in either of the last two rounds of transfer. Workers in Wigan tell me that it has been a tragedy to watch services run down over several years. Some of them have worked for the Post Office for decades, but this is the final straw.

The Post Office faces pressure from the loss of traditional services such as letters and from falling Government revenue, but it is by no means without assets. Last year it announced profits of £35 million. That should have been the catalyst to retain experienced and well-paid staff and expand into new areas—in France, La Banque Postale, established a decade ago, made a profit of €1 billion in 2016—but instead, it has cut staff and branches and awarded the chief executive a 7% pay rise. Behind the latest wave of closures is a story of greed, exploitation and carelessness with the social fabric and economic heart of our communities.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful speech. Nottingham city centre post office is incredibly well used and very busy. When that transfers to WHSmith—the Post Office is not interested in what local people have to say about that—a lot of the staff will not transfer but will choose to leave. The post office will lose some of those experienced staff, who probably have a very good relationship with existing customers. On behalf of all of us who face a post office closure in our towns and cities, does she share my concern that that is a huge problem and a dereliction of the service we have come to expect?

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but it does something else: it prevents the Post Office from being able to adapt, change and build new strategies for survival in the future. A lot of the staff standing on the cold street outside the Crown post office before Christmas told me that in recent years they had come to believe that what was happening was a deliberate strategy to run down our postal services, to the point that they are no longer viable or sustainable. That would be a shameful thing for the Government to preside over, without acting. Those staff, our towns and our communities deserve so much better than that. I ask the Minister today to place a moratorium on the franchising programme and to bring together stakeholders for a conversation about how to grow the business and make the Post Office fit for future challenges, rather than selling off one of our most valued public services to a failing retailer.

The Minister has consistently told us that it is not the place of Ministers to intervene, but perhaps she will take a leaf out of the book of her colleague who presented a petition to the Commons urging the then Business Secretary to instruct the Post Office to halt post office closures and listen to the people. That was back in 2008, and the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) was absolutely right. If the Prime Minister recognises the role of Government in protecting this publicly owned national asset, then surely so must the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) on securing this important debate.

Crown post offices, like the postal service itself, are at the heart of our communities. Up and down the country, post offices are hubs for local people and their neighbourhoods. They bring people together, they connect people, and at a time when community institutions, from pubs to community centres to libraries, are closing at record rates, we need our post offices as never before.

I pay particular tribute to the post office staff serving my constituents in Croydon North. I had the opportunity of visiting the Post Office depot in Factory Lane just before Christmas; I repeat here, on the record, the thanks I offered the staff there for the fantastic job they do for the rest of us all year round, not only in the very busy Christmas period. It is sad in the extreme that, instead of protecting these vital and publicly owned assets, the Government are complicit in what my hon. Friend calls their managed decline. It is particularly galling for the public that they are paying more while getting less. The costs of getting rid of staff and refurbishing the franchisee’s stores are met by the public, but they all lead to a reduced service.

It is a tragedy to see our postal services being run down in this way. Fewer counter positions means more time spent queuing, especially at busy times of the year such as Christmas. The loss of post offices presents particular difficulty for older and disabled people who are less able to get around—particularly, as we heard earlier, if new facilities are situated above ground floor level—and overworked staff have less time available to offer help and advice to customers who may need it.

[Lilian Greenwood]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about people with mobility difficulties. One of the issues that has been raised with me is that of people who have other conditions, perhaps neurodiverse conditions, who find the overload of being in a busy shopping centre particularly difficult. Does he think that has been properly recognised in the proposals to franchise into shopping centres?

[Mr Reed]

My hon. Friend makes an important point; clearly that has not been taken into account at all. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan referred to an attempt to site a post office in a retail outlet called Bargain Booze. How inappropriate is that for many people—children, for instance, who might be going to a post office to use its services, but are walking through aisles of cheap, low-quality alcohol? That is entirely unacceptable.