Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Michael Connarty and Graeme Morrice(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
3. What assessment he has made of the implications for Government policy of the outcome of the referendum on independence for Scotland.
Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)
7. What assessment he has made of the implications for Government policy of the outcome of the referendum on independence for Scotland.
Torphichen Sub-Post Office (Closure)
Debate between Michael Connarty and Graeme Morrice
Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
The reason why I have called for this Adjournment debate is to warn all Members of the House that what happened to the sub-post office in the village of Torphichen could happen in every constituency in the UK, and is likely to do so, given the plans of the Post Office.
I should like to draw a timeline for the House. At the time of the last review of the post office network there was no proposal to close Torphichen sub-post office. In my constituency there were a number of closures in very small villages with very small numbers of post office users. However, Torphichen is a village of over 600 residents living in over 300 dwellings. It is a very well-known heritage village where the priory of the Order of St John was founded after the knights left the Holy Land, and it is visited a great deal by tourists passing through West Lothian on their way to Linlithgow palace, where Mary, Queen of Scots was born. The village’s natural attractiveness makes it very popular with people who want to buy houses and commute into Edinburgh. It is not a village with a down-at-heel population who have very little use for a post office. Moreover, it has many elderly residents.
On 2 November 2011 the most recent postmaster, who had not been a shopkeeper before and had been renting the premises for some nine months, decided to give up the premises, stop being a shopkeeper and give up the licence at the same time. The person who previously ran the post office and very popular shop—the only shop in the village—had done so for a long time. That is the crucial point. It is the post office that has sustained the village shop for many years, as do many post offices in communities across the shires of England and the counties of Scotland.
On 8 November Post Office Ltd sent a letter under the name of Brian Turnbull, the change manager, to MPs, MSPs and local authorities saying that there had been a temporary closure. It put an apology for the temporary closure on the window of the shop. Interestingly, I believe that that is the same Brian Turnbull who used to be the manager of the post office in Bathgate, who got me and my constituency party to campaign for some years to keep his post office open. When his Crown post office shut, all the people who worked there got their books and were made redundant. Obviously he then got taken on to carry out the same task in other areas.
The odd thing about the letter was that it was written from an address in St Albans. It referred to a couple of telephone numbers, but when I called them I heard things like, “Press 1 if you want this, press 2 if you want that, or press 3 if you want nothing.” The website that the letter referred to was just a general website with nothing at all about what was happening to Torphichen post office. There was no way of communicating.
In the past, the network manager for Scotland would have had the courtesy to phone the Member of Parliament, because this is a reserved matter. They would have spoken to the Member of Parliament and involved them in any difficulties, temporary closures, or proposals for changes or for a reopening. That has always been the case until now. The new network manager for Scotland, Ms Sally Buchanan, did not take the trouble to do that. In fact, we had to search out her telephone number so that we could contact her.
Ms Buchanan had been contacted by Neil Findlay, the adept MSP for Lothian. He contacted the address in Edinburgh and received a reply on 21 November. The reply was interesting because it said that the Post Office had done modelling. I do not know when it had found the time to do that modelling between 2 and 8 November. Having done the modelling, it had decided that the Post Office Local option, which was mentioned when we debated the Postal Services Act 2011, would be best for that property.
We discovered that, despite the fact that somebody in the village had approached the owner of the post office building and offered to buy it, the Post Office had got the key from the previous owner and stripped out all the security that a normal sub-post office has. For some reason it drilled holes in the safe so that it could no longer be used to store money. When I challenged the Post Office on that matter, the reply was:
“That we removed the Post Office owned equipment, including the computer system, from the premises is not indicative of future service arrangements; it is normal practice for us to recover our property where there is any doubt over our ability to have continued access to the premises.”
As I wrote to the Minister and the head of Post Office Ltd, Ms Vennells, it is quite clear that this was an act of vandalism by the Post Office. I can see the point of taking out the computer, but not of ripping out all the security that a normal sub-post office uses. It is clear that the Post Office had taken the decision to downgrade the sub-post office without any consultation with the public.
I have never had to put up with anything like that. I do not think that any Member from any part of the House or from any party would find that acceptable. I certainly would not have found it acceptable in the past and did not expect it to happen in this case.
Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I am a neighbouring Member, representing Livingston in West Lothian, and I am therefore well aware of the community to which he refers. He said that there was no consultation with the community and little consultation with him as an elected Member of Parliament. Is it not the case that the code of practice for the post office network requires full and meaningful public consultation if any changes to particular post offices and sub-post offices are to be made?
Michael Connarty
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention because I am about to come on to that subject. The code of practice was attached to the original circular that was sent to MPs and MSPs. The Post Office apologised for the inconvenience of the temporary closure and attached to every circular its code of practice, which states:
“We’ll let you know about any change as soon as we possibly can. Sometimes, change is out of our control, but we’ll try to keep you as up-to-date about what’s happening as much as we can. We try to make sure you have 4 weeks’ notice before anything happens. If we’re going to make big changes, there’ll be a ‘consultation period’ which lasts about 6 weeks.”
I can verify that ripping out the equipment happened within days of the Post Office finding out that the closure had taken place.
From then on, it was clear that the Post Office had immediately been contacted by someone in the village who wished to purchase the building and reopen the post office—Miss Oonagh Shackleton and her partner Ian Jamieson, who run a very good manufacturing company in another village. They were keen to give the shop back to the village, and they talked to the Post Office immediately. We also know that the shop’s previous owner, Mussarat Aziz, who had been the sub-postmistress and was also the sub-postmistress in Boghall in Bathgate in another part of my constituency, was approached by the Post Office to ascertain whether she would take over the post office temporarily and run it as a sub-post office. On the one hand, the Post Office was saying that it wanted to keep the sub-post office going, and on the other hand, it had been approached by someone who wanted to do a similar thing.
At the public meeting that we held in the village, Oonagh Shackleton said that she had a business plan, which included financing a sub-post office. In the agreement that we had when the post office network review took place, the money that the Government gave the Post Office included money for running a sub-post office in Torphichen. The money had not been taken away or withdrawn, and it was therefore assumed that it would be available. However, for some mysterious reason that point was never confirmed to Oonagh Shackleton. She decided that she wanted to open the shop in the village again anyway, and she went ahead and purchased it.
However, now that all the security has been torn out, we are told that Mr Brian Turnbull says that if we want a post office service of any kind in that shop in the village, we can have only a Post Office Local. I call that blackmail. All that stuff about removing the equipment not meaning that the Post Office had changed its mind is clearly a bluff.
Scotland Bill
Debate between Michael Connarty and Graeme Morrice(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Michael Connarty
The point is that when the electorate then see that person’s behaviour in the list system, they are puzzled. I give the example of the Lothian Members, who are centred mainly in the city of Edinburgh. Where do the SNP list Members have their office? They have it in a little village called Whitburn in my constituency—well out of the city centre and the locale near the Parliament. That might have something to do with the fact that every time we have an election, the person who loses for the SNP stands against my MSP under first past the post, and that constituency happens to cover the village of Whitburn and areas in West Lothian. That clearly distorts not only the electoral system but the use of resources allocated to list Members, basically to try to back up the challenge under first past the post. New clause 1 would remove that problem by providing for two Members for each MP seat—it could be split in half or done some other way. That would give people the sort of representation that they like.
I have no doubt that colleagues in all the political parties in Scotland believe that when people come to see them, they know that they are their representatives and that they are accountable to those people. In the Scottish parliamentary system, however, people do not really know because of the number of layers involved. They might go to the list Member, and if they get nothing there they will try the first-past-the-post Member and vice versa. The list Member might first back up the person and then take a different view. Then it might come to seeing the Member of Parliament to find out whether they will back them up.
Graeme Morrice
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who represents a constituency in the local authority area where I have a constituency. I certainly share his views and concerns on this matter and I empathise with his viewpoint. Does he agree, however, that the real problem is the absolute confusion among the electorate about the difference between constituency MSPs and regional list MSPs? Within Scotland, possibly 99% of the electorate, if asked, would not know who all their regional list MSPs were.
Michael Connarty
That is an easy question to answer. It is quite clear that most people in this Chamber, if asked to list them, would not know all the regional list MSPs in their area. That is not the way I like to see the issue, however. It is not so much about confusion among the electorate; it is more that the electorate are not well represented. It is not because they are confused, but because the system invites certain behaviours that run counter to good representation. People do not know who is accountable to them and it is quite clear that list members are not accountable to the electorate. They are accountable to their party, because it is the party that puts them on the list and into the system.