Crown Post Offices: Franchising

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) for securing the debate and for introducing it so comprehensively. As she will see, I have been waiting for three years to say some of these things; this is a great opportunity.

My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) started by talking about the impact and importance of post offices in our communities. Before coming here, I was a community worker and an academic studying community work. I can testify that having such institutions on our high street as part of our community is incredibly important. Some institutions, such as libraries and post offices, have been part of our communities for generations, and different generations use them to mingle and come together. They not only form a physical presence in our community, but bring different parts of our community, of different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds, together in the same place. They are uniquely and incredibly important to the cohesion of our communities.

Since 2000, I have lived in the Brunswick Town area of the Hove constituency that I represent. That town is characterised by having lots of the regency houses for which Hove is known. It also had a Crown post office that had been there for many generations. It was a well loved and heavily used post office. I was elected in 2015. Two months after being elected, I was contacted by the Post Office, which said that it was opening a consultation with the potential to close the branch. I immediately met Post Office representatives in my office in Parliament, because if the Post Office was going to have a consultation, I wanted to engage in it in an open-hearted, engaged and positive way. I wanted to make sure that it got all the information it needed to make a decision in the best interest of the community that I represent and that every single voice that needed to be heard would be heard.

When the Post Office’s representatives came to Parliament and sat with me, the first questions I asked were, “Is this a genuine consultation? Are you going to listen to the voices in our community? Are you going to look at and study the facts and base your decision on those facts, or is this a fait accompli? I need to know right now.” They both looked me in the eye and made me an absolute cast-iron categorical promise that it was a genuine consultation that would look at the facts and listen to the community, and that they would base their decision on what they saw and heard.

On the back of that, I engaged fully to try to deliver the voices and the information the Post Office’s representatives needed to hear. I made sure that there was a public meeting one evening, to which 200 local community residents turned up in an open-hearted way, so that they could sit with the representatives, feed in their insight and how they use the post office, and make sure that their needs were taken into consideration. That meeting was a difficult one, because people were really concerned, and I made sure that the people who had come from the Post Office were treated with respect, which sometimes meant challenging the people I represent and ensuring that they engaged in a positive way. In other words, I used some of the political capital that they had given me in order, at times, to push back at them. That is a difficult thing to do at such meetings, but in the interests of getting the right outcome it was worth doing.

A petition was set up locally that received 5,400 signatures and there was another petition online that received an additional 2,000 signatures. The voice of the community was heard loud and clear.

The Post Office said of this post office—the Crown post office in Brunswick Town in Hove—that it had spoken to customers who were very willing to make the walk, for 1.1 miles uphill, to another post office, which was in a convenience store that had a counter. However, at the public meeting, not one person said that was the case. The Post Office could not provide me with the names of people who had said they were perfectly happy to make that journey. I went into the Brunswick Town post office several times to speak to customers and I could not find a single customer who said they would rather make that journey of 1.1 miles up a hill than use the post office that was already in their community and that had been there for generations.

So I went back to the Post Office with that information and the Post Office ignored it. I told the Post Office about people who could not make that walk of 1.1 miles, either because they were living with disabilities or living into old age; they simply could not make that journey. The Post Office heard their voices directly, because I made sure that it heard those voices directly.

Then I went in to the Brunswick Town post office, because the Post Office had said to me that in the previous year the footfall and the number of customers for it had fallen. The Post Office showed me statistics to back that up. So, as I say, I went into that post office and when I opened the door I saw something that I had seen very, very regularly—a queue, snaking through the building all the way to the door. Of the three counters, only one was open. In the 15 years that I had lived in that community, I had never seen a situation in which only one counter was open; it was always the case before that the post office had been a hub and all of its counters had been open.

So I spoke to some of the staff in the post office and it turned out that eight months earlier a diktat had come down from the Post Office to close two of the counters and not use them; only one of the counters was to be used. Why was that? I am absolutely convinced that the Post Office was running down that Crown post office, by allowing only one counter to be used and by only allowing the staff there—against their wishes—to use one counter.

It was very clear that the Post Office wanted to drive down the customer numbers, so I wrote to it and asked directly, “Have you asked the question and looked into whether the fall in footfall is due to fewer people wanting to use that branch, or is it because more people are finding it difficult to use that branch, or they just give up before they get to the counter in the first place?” The Post Office could not answer the question.

The process ended and the Post office announced in writing that it was going to close the Crown post office in Brunswick Town. There would be no further engagement and within weeks that post office had closed.

This sorry story ends a year later, when I walked down the street in Brunswick Town and discovered that the Post Office had opened a new branch inside a convenience store next door to the Crown post office that it had closed down, because it said there was no need for it. I repeat: next door. I have absolutely no doubt that I was misled, that the community I represent was misled and—worst of all—that the customers who used and depended on that post office were misled and the staff who had given a career and indeed a lifetime in work to that post office branch were misled. The post office staff’s jobs disappeared and the jobs that have been created in their place have no pension liability and no guarantee that they would have the standards that people who work long-term in the Post Office can expect. And those workers were no longer part of the Post Office family.

We have a Prime Minister who stood on the steps of Downing Street and said she was going to maintain those sorts of rights and tackle injustices. The Post Office is one of her companies; it is an organisation that she runs. However, she has allowed it to dwindle, to be stripped of assets and to be taken away from our high streets, and replaced with something that has less value, that makes less of a contribution to our communities, and that offers less stability and value in the workplace to the people who work for it.

I say to the Minister directly that I understand that she has said that it is not her job to meddle with the running of the Post Office. However, in times such as this, I and my community expect her to roll up her sleeves and get stuck in, because if branches are being taken from our high streets, and MPs and our communities are being misled, we are their elected officials, she is speaking on behalf of the Government and we expect her to act.