Post Office Closures

Marion Fellows Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I thank the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on securing this debate. It is testament to how passionately people feel about this issue that so many Members are here fighting for their local community in the last week of this Parliament. I expected to walk into an almost empty room, but I am amazed and delighted that so many people are here.

This is the second time I have spoken on this issue. I could not possibly sum up everything that everyone has said, but I can give examples from my own area. Motherwell is about to lose its post office, which is situated in the town centre. The number of businesses that will be affected if the closure goes ahead is incalculable. People go to the town centre to go to the post office, to get their pensions and to spend money. We do not have a WH Smith in Motherwell any more. We do not have one in Wishaw, either: it closed very recently. The Wishaw Crown post office closed a number of years ago, and we saw the effect that that had. It was relocated into a nice, good shop which, unfortunately, was not designed to be a post office. Access is difficult and queues snake round what are effectively the old Woolworths long shelves. It does not work. We are really concerned.

The CWU has been out trying to save the Motherwell Crown post office. I conducted a survey of customers, and they are all absolutely incandescent: 84% of the people I spoke to said that they use the post office every week, and they have to queue. People said that if they lose that post office, small businesses that use the post office services will be hugely affected. They do not know where they will go, because we are losing banks in the area. Although there are still other banks, that is not what those small businesses want. They want to use banking services in the post office and do postal work at the same time, because many of them rely on the post office to get things out to customers.

It is really disturbing that, although the Government claimed that they would use post offices as the front office for Government, that has not happened. I have spoken to postmasters and postmistresses, and the loss of Government business has affected their business in general. I could not find any figures about Motherwell Crown post office’s turnover and why it was picked. I was told that it was all commercially confidential. If some Members have accessed that kind of information, why cannot all Members do so? It is not right.

At the end of the day, we need to keep our post offices. We have lost a number of sub-branches, which have moved from very accessible local places further out into estates and housing schemes that are not accessible for the majority of people. They suit the people who are there, who can go to their local convenience store, but they do not suit other people. In fact, a post office in the Motherwell civic square closed, right next to where the local authority has hundreds of workers. They cannot access a post office. If the one in the main town centre closes, there is going to be a loss of work for those in the post office and in the businesses around it.

I feel very strongly about this issue, and I am glad that there is such cross-party opposition to the recent round of closures and the effect it has on the poorest and most elderly in our communities, who use post offices the most. I ask the Minister to put pressure on the Post Office to halt this latest round of closures.