Royal Mail Delivery Office Closures Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Mike Hill
Main Page: Mike Hill (Labour - Hartlepool)Department Debates - View all Mike Hill's debates with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Royal Mail Delivery Office Closures
Mike Hill Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)
Thank you for letting me speak in this important debate, Mr Gapes. I pay tribute to the Communication Workers Union, whose members feel strongly about this matter, and have voted overwhelmingly to strike in protection of their pay and pensions.
Since the privatisation of Royal Mail in October 2013, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) said, 142 delivery offices have closed. That is 10% of the network. Thankfully, my delivery office in Hartlepool is not one of them, but with closures happening at such a pace, I wonder when it will be our turn. The impact of a delivery office closure on the public is immense. Losing them not only deprives people of a local place to go to collect their parcels or undelivered post, but often means they must commute to the next town or beyond to access a service that all of us rely on at some point.
The Royal Mail is able to make these changes because the provision of delivery offices is not regulated. As we found with the closure of our central post office in Hartlepool earlier this year, a short consultation is often followed by swift closure. There are implications for pay and pensions in those closures, as there were in that closure and in the transfer of staff to WHSmith. The current CWU dispute is about fighting the introduction of an inferior pension scheme and a below-inflation pay offer. People rely on a delivery office being close to hand. The programme of managed decline needs to be stopped before any more damage is done, more jobs are lost and more communities lose these important assets.