Post Office Closures

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Post Office closures.

It am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for the opportunity to discuss this important subject. The number of right hon. and hon. Members present shows how important it is—who would have thought that there was an election on? I am aware that many Members wish to speak, so I will keep my comments as brief as possible. If hon. Members wish to intervene rather than make their own speeches, I will try to take some interventions. To help with the timing, I intend not to speak at the end of the debate.

I appreciate that the last debate on the subject, which was held as recently as November and was led by the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), aired many issues that I am sure hon. Members will wish to repeat today. There is concern that plans for the Post Office will be delayed by the forthcoming election, and there are also outstanding concerns from November’s debate—I think the Minister was rather rudely cut off by Divisions in the House—on which it would be good to get some clarity today. I will briefly mention, first, my local post office closures—I am sure that every hon. Member present wants to air a local post office closure —and secondly, the bigger picture of the long-term sustainability of, and game plan for, the whole post office network.

I recognise the good work done by the Government since 2011. The network has been stabilised, the number of closures has been reduced substantially and the subsidy to the network has been managed down from £210 million in 2012 to some £80 million this year as a result of flexibilities under some of the new arrangements. There are upsides as well as downsides. There are something like 200,000 additional opening hours every week, many of them at weekends when post offices would normally be closed, and some £2 billion has been invested in the network transformation plan since 2012. That stands in contrast to the previous 10 years or so, in which half the network branches were closed. My constituency lost more than half its post office and sub-post office branches. When I became an MP in 1997, there were nearly 20,000 branches, and that figure is now down to about 11,500. There are some encouraging signs, but also some very worrying signs when people are faced with the sudden closure of post offices in their own area. When the branches were being closed, we were promised that the Crown post offices were absolutely sacrosanct and would remain the main flagship of the Post Office on the high street.

Post office branches and Crown post offices are very important parts of the local community. Local businesses, including retail and other small businesses, rely on them heavily, because without an excuse to come to the high street to use the post office, people do not use the neighbouring shops. Post offices act as community hubs. They are well used by the elderly population, particularly in areas such as mine that have a high population of pensioners, and by those from disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly those who do not have conventional bank accounts. For those reasons, post offices remain popular and well used, with something like 17 million customers a week.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Does he agree that the Government need to look at the services that post offices provide, which they are losing, and the return that they are getting on them?

[Tim Loughton]

That is a very important point that I would like to come on to; it is a question about why the Post Office is not growing rather than retrenching.

In 2016, the Post Office announced the closure of 31 Crown post office branches— even though the Crown offices are now breaking even, after making a £46 million loss four years ago. Some of those post offices have not been converted into the new type of post office and their future is still uncertain. In January this year, a further 37 Crown post offices were identified for closure, including the last two remaining Crown post offices in my constituency, which were in Lancing and Shoreham. That caused huge concern among my constituents and gave rise to lots of petitions and demonstrations by people from all parties. I found it particularly disrespectful that the first I heard of it was when a constituent rang me up to ask what I was doing about it; the Post Office had not even had the courtesy to let the sitting Member of Parliament or councillors know what it was planning.

I organised an urgent meeting with the Post Office and it went through the procedures. I was reassured that firms such as WH Smith had taken on more than 100 of the franchises and everything was supposedly working well. I gather that the other firms that have taken post offices on include a chain called Bargain Booze, an off-licence with some 30 post offices—some hon. Members may have concerns about how appropriate that is. I was told that both the Crown post office branches in my constituency were unprofitable, which was why they were to be franchised out, yet the Lancing branch, along with one very small sub-post office right on the fringe of the village of Lancing, now looks after a population of 27,000. Not surprisingly, queues are frequent. It also services the second largest business park in the whole of West Sussex, with 228 firms that employ more than 3,000 people. The village has lost almost all its bank branches; we were told that when we lost them, we could do all our banking at the post office, so there was no great concern. If the post office branches are not making a profit, that suggests that they are not being run very well—it is certainly not for lack of usage or lack of demand from the local population.

I was told today that one of those Crown post office branches is to be transferred to a nearby convenience store, which is much smaller than the existing post office and has operated since only 2013. On the upside, there will be extended opening hours on Saturdays and Sundays and new disability access, but on the downside, nobody believes that the store is big enough to house a replacement Crown post office. It will have fewer serving positions, when there are already serious concerns about queues, and it will not be able to offer the biometric enrolment service for Home Office applications. There are also concerns about staff transfer: we know that in the post offices that have so far converted, only 10 of the 400 staff have been TUPE-ed across and they are often going into minimum wage jobs. There are question marks over ongoing training for staff who now work in non-Crown post offices, which have tended to have a big turnover of staff. In many of these shops, staff hours get cut and, after initial promises about extended opening times, the shops tend to retrench.

What happens if the model fails? Some 8,000 sub-post offices are now in convenience stores, which have seen a 4% reduction in staff hours since the national living wage came in. Some 30% of businesses also face challenges with the revaluation of business rates. The Daltons website currently shows 705 post office branches for sale. There is a lot of change and churn in the sector, so longer-term questions arise about the viability and sustainability of the new arrangements.

Both my Crown post offices are co-located with sorting offices. Although the sorting offices are run not by the Post Office but by Royal Mail, they are very conveniently placed next to the post offices. Experience has shown that without those anchor partnership tenants, sorting offices are relocated to out-of-town sites, which are much less convenient for people who need to get their deliveries, particularly in places with many elderly people who may not be so mobile.

There is going to be a consultation on my post office. It will be extended because of the election, but we all know that not a single consultation has overturned any of the proposals to transfer these post offices, so I fear that it will be something of a token exercise. The measurements of an access door may be changed by a few inches or the sweet counter may be relocated because it gets in the way of guide dogs, but frankly the consultation will be a token exercise.

I am aware that Citizens Advice does a good job as the oversight body and that some of its research has suggested that in some cases there have been some improvements to access and to service with the new format, but overall the fears are that the queues will get longer, transactions will take longer and the service will be less consistent. People are dealing with different and new staff, and it is just not as good as it used to be.

That brings me to my second point. Where exactly is the Post Office going? Everything that the Post Office has done—I have cited the statistics about making it more efficient, reducing losses and so on, and perhaps extending some opening hours—is all based on retrenchment, which is a policy that sees the post office, especially the directly owned post office, getting smaller and offering fewer services to its customers. There are now fewer than 300 post offices that are directly owned Crown post offices.

The financial services part of the Post Office, which should be a big money-spinner, is diminishing. At the beginning of the year, 150 financial specialists were made redundant. There was a specialist financial office in the Lansing post office, but it was closed earlier this year. I gather that the specialist mortgage advice that the Post Office gives, because of its relationship with the Bank of Ireland, generates a one-off payment of just £800 for brokering mortgages, and there is no ongoing revenue. The Post Office seems to be selling itself very cheap in that regard and it is caught in that relationship until 2023, and it does not sound as though it is a very profitable one for the Post Office.

My question to the Minister, which I hope she will be able to answer to enlighten us, is: why is the Post Office not making more of banking and financial services in particular, given that it is a trusted name and a presence on the high street, at a time when conventional banks are disappearing from high streets?

Post Office revenues roughly break down as follows. I gather that about 47% of the revenue of post offices is from stamp sales, but increasingly stamps are available to buy anywhere. There are also Government services, including Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency services, fishing licences and the Department for Work and Pensions card account, but of course those services are all being squeezed and the revenue from them has been diminishing. The Post Office also offers access to current accounts. Banking protocols have been sorted out so that there can be cross-fertilisation of different bank services within a post office, which had been a problem. And then there are the Post Office’s financial services, but again that seems to be a declining market for the Post Office.

Why is the Post Office not copying the challenger banks, for example? Banks such as Metro Bank and Handelsbanken are making a really good fist of expanding into new markets. Metro Bank now has 915,000 customers; it has taken £8 billion in deposits and has 110 branches, and it is growing. Alternatively, as hon. Members have asked in these kinds of debates before, why are we not doing what has been done in France? One thing that we might want to copy from France is La Banque Postale, which was founded in 2006 specifically as a tool to help to tackle financial exclusion and in 2016 had a turnover of €5.6 billion and a pre-tax profit of just over €1 billion. There are similar examples in New Zealand and Italy. There is surely a fantastic opportunity for the state-owned Post Office to take advantage of changing markets and changes in how we conduct our financial business, as a body that is trusted and that is already on the high street. For some reason, the Post Office is not taking that opportunity.

Similarly, why is the Post Office not making more of click and collect services? Everywhere I go now there are shops sprouting up on high streets specifically for people to collect their Amazon and other deliveries, because they are not at home to receive them. The Post Office is already on high streets and surely could offer that kind of service, and yet I gather that 80% of post offices do not have those kinds of facilities. There will be even fewer post offices with them if they are moved to smaller premises that just not do have the room to store and collect parcels.

The overall commercial revenue of the Post Office has been virtually stagnant in the last few years. So it is a great mystery why it is not expanding and becoming more profitable, which would be better for the taxpayer and customers, rather than following a long-term strategy that appears to be based on retrenchment and shrinkage.

Finally, I have some questions for the Minister, in addition to the bigger question of what the big game plan is for the Post Office. The network transformation programme is due to end by March 2018, by which time some 7,500 traditional sub-post offices will have been converted to the new model, but what comes after March 2018 in terms of subsidy and further transformation revenues? In opinion polls, 85% of the public have expressed support for the Government—the taxpayer—continuing to subsidise the Post Office, and not just to deal with the obvious challenges that face rural post offices, which will always face the sparsity challenge. Are any further reductions in Crown network offices planned for the next year? Citizens Advice has suggested that there should be an automatic break if 5% of branches announce that they are to be closed without breaking the access criteria, which is quite hard to do anyway. Will that happen?

The biggest question is: why is the Post Office not taking current opportunities to expand instead of retrenching, particularly as it has the security of Government backing for its revenues and is a trusted name? In 2010, when the Government promised to transform the Post Office—

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. I have a list of 12 Back Benchers who wish to speak.

[Tim Loughton]

I am on my final sentence, Sir Edward. In 2010, the Government promised to transform the Post Office into a genuine front office for the Government and that there would be a significant expansion of the Post Office’s banking services, but they have failed so far to implement those measures, as the revenue from Government services has fallen by 40% and income from financial services has stagnated. Closing down flagship branches, getting rid of experienced staff and putting counters into the back of a WH Smith store or a Bargain Booze outlet is surely not a plan for greater innovation, which I think is what our constituents want to see.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James]

I am not refusing to take interventions; I am trying to conclude my response to Members’ legitimate concerns. I think that I have responded to quite a number; but I must allow time for my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham to conclude the debate.

[Tim Loughton]

I am happy for the Minister to take it.

[Margot James]

Okay, but I am not going to fill it with interventions; I am going to carry on.

Hon. Members have said that post offices do not have click and collect services, but I want to reassure them that there are 10,500 local post offices that do provide those services. That is another area of potential growth. I invite Members to write to me if their constituency branches do not have them; we will look into it. As to the allegation about hours being reduced in convenience stores, I am pleased to confirm that that is not the case. Opening hours are not decreasing in the fullness of time.