Backbench Business

Mark Williams Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I will be very quick. In many ways, I will reiterate many of the messages that we have heard in the Chamber this afternoon. I will reflect specifically on the position of the Crown post office in Aberystwyth in my constituency.

Many Members have talked about the inadequacy of the consultation process and the complete inability of the Post Office to listen to the many representations that have been made. That is certainly the case with the campaigning that we undertook in my constituency. We were not surprised that WHSmith emerged as the franchisee in Aberystwyth. Of the 28 branches where franchise partners have been announced this year, 27 have been with WHSmith. I have to say that, since the announcement of a consultation in March, nothing more than lip service has been paid to that word.

[Neil Coyle]

It is very difficult for Post Office representatives to listen to local communities when they do not even attend a meeting. The Walworth Society in my constituency set up a public meeting with councillors and myself, and the Post Office did not even turn up.

[Mr Williams]

I have had exactly the same experience in my constituency. We had two public meetings. The Post Office came to the second one, but not the first. We had petitions and demonstrations. We made representations to everybody, with four political parties working together on the streets of Aberystwyth. It was a very good experience, but it has had absolutely no effect on WHSmith whatsoever. Individual managers have been courteous and polite, and have occasionally answered the phone and come to see me but, on the substance of the case, we have been well and truly ignored.

The Post Office still has not addressed the fundamental concerns we have raised. The research undertaken on the record of WHSmith by Consumer Focus—a very good organisation that existed at the time—concluded that queue times, services times and customer advice are all worse under WHSmith than they were under the Crown post office regime. There are also genuine concerns about disabled access, the number of counter positions open and congestion in the shop. Of course, there is also the impact of losing good, hard-working staff who have years of experience.

The CWU has said—this is worth noting, and I hope the Minister will convey the concerns about the consultation process to the Post Office—that it is unaware of a single case where public consultation has overturned the Post Office’s proposals in recent years. My constituents in Aberystwyth are convinced, as I am, that the whole process is an utter sham.

I want to talk a little about the staff and how they have been treated. They were given three options, which seems clinical and very kind to be given three options. They were given the opportunity to take redundancy. In peripheral parts of Wales, if we go as far as we can to the west, the opportunities for good, well-paid jobs are few and far between. Secondly, staff were given the opportunity to redeploy—this is the option that really got to the emotions of many staff—to the nearest Crown post office. If we picture Aberystwyth on the weather map on the news, it is in the middle of the west coast of Wales. The nearest Crown post offices that my constituents could relocate to were in Port Talbot or in Shrewsbury across the border in England. That is not an option for my constituents at all. The third option was for my constituents to go down the route of TUPE agreements, which we have heard many concerns about. I am genuinely concerned. We might seem to have lost the battle, but like the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), I appeal to the Minister at this late stage to get involved in this case and to do what she can to influence things.

I am conscious that my friend, the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones), wants to speak, so I will finish by saying this. We have lost post office after post office in rural communities. We can wax lyrical about the emotions of it and the effect on rural communities, but they are very real. We are talking about some of the most scattered, remote rural communities. When the pub, the church and the school have been taken out, the final blow is when that community loses its post office, which has a galvanising role. That has been the record of successive Governments, including coalition ones in which Liberals were involved, the current Government and preceding ones. We have to reverse that trend. We have to look at a sensible level of subsidy to sustain the network in rural areas, because once it is gone, it will not come back.