Backbench Business

Patricia Gibson Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) for bringing the debate forward. I really wanted to speak in the debate because I recall the round of post office closures in 2008 and 2009. I remember going door to door with others gathering hundreds and thousands of signatures on a petition to save local Crown post offices in towns around what came to be my constituency. That was done in response to the anger and despair so many felt about the closure of the local Crown post offices. I remember speaking at public meetings when I encountered at first hand the sense of resignation felt by too many people that what they wanted and their community felt it needed was simply not valued—it did not matter to the powers that be. In the event, five vital and much-beloved post offices were closed.

We often hear politicians talking about community—how it is important, how it matters and how it should be valued. It should also matter when a community comes together to express its concern about a valued asset, the local Crown post office, which in so many ways is the beating heart of a community, if not one of its ventricles. Post offices provide a lifeline: they are the lifeblood, even, of our communities. That is even more true of our rural communities. For such communities, post offices boost their diversity and resilience as well as protecting jobs and customer service.

The decline of the Crown post office is a matter of great sadness. Over the years, this trusted institution on our high street—perhaps it is the most trusted institution on our high street—has been stripped of too many of its functions. That is despite its highly trained staff and its perfect position to provide banking and other services. However, instead of modernisation, increasingly we see decimation.

More and more services are being outsourced to retailers such as WHSmith, with that chain installing its wee counters at the back of its stores, meaning poorer service as well as the loss of a beloved community asset. WHSmith and other outlets do not want to match the terms and conditions that the Post Office offers its employees. Even if it did, the income that the post office counters offer those retailers would not cover that cost, so there is now the absurd situation of the Post Office using tens of millions of pounds to pay off long-serving staff, so they can be replaced by part-time workers on the minimum wage, which has led to uncertainty and understandable industrial unrest across the whole network.

The Scottish National party firmly opposed the privatisation of Royal Mail. However, at the time it was privatised the UK Government said that the Post Office would be kept wholly in the public sector. Instead, a new 10-year deal with WHSmith to relocate yet more post office branches into those stores was announced. Will the Minister tell us where this is leading? Will she give us assurances that the promise to keep post offices in public ownership will be honoured?

Franchising is quite rightly viewed as soft privatisation, and the Minister needs to address that point to reassure Members. We need to know that our post offices have a future, and that that future is in the public sector, as promised. We need a plan for our post offices, and we could do worse than explore the measures France undertook for its post offices when it established La Banque Postale— excuse my pronunciation. Alongside those problems, we have seen high street banks gradually withdrawing and retreating from our high streets, so that must be a reasonable option.

Like in France, our post offices could make a plan to grow revenues in areas such as financial services, with which France has had huge success. Our post offices need not be in managed decline, and I am very interested to hear the Minister’s response and how she views the future of what remains of our post offices, which are community assets held in deep affection, and how they can be secured.