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POLLY BILLINGTON: It's the end of an era in Chalgrove.
Mrs Croxford has tried to sell her post office as a going concern. But
as she and her husband now are drawing their pensions and with no buyer
available, it closes for good in June.
MRS CROXFORD: It's been in the family for
over ninety years. We've had it on the market for nearly two years without
any success. We decided if we really wanted to retire we really had no
option but to close it down. I think the uncertainty over the future of
the network, although they've got lots of plans to open a bank and all
the rest of it, it's not - if you're starting off today and you'd got money
to invest you might think twice before you invested it in a post office.
It's sad, because it's a lovely profession and our customers are our friends.
BILLINGTON: Those friends include many
of the village's three thousand residents, especially those who don't have
the means to travel far afield. Chalgrove might be close enough to Oxford
for commuters - but not for pensioners like Mary Mayall and Elsie Roberts.
MARY MAYALL AND ELSIE ROBERTS: I don't know what we're going to do then.
Nor DO I. We'll have to pay bus fare to Cowley. What, out of the 75p they've
just given us? That's a bit stupid. It's only two thirty. I really feel
that we should have a post office don't you Mary?. Yeah we're going to
be really let down I think. We're going to be lost without it to be honest.
She's got it to a tee - we are going to be lost without our post office.
BILLINGTON: Post office closures increased
steadily during the late nineteen nineties - Mrs Croxford's is one of nearly
four hundred that are expected to shut down this year. And that rate of
decline could get worse because the government wants to pay pensions and
benefits into bank accounts by 2003. If that happens the fear is fewer
people will use their local post offices, they'll become less viable, and
even more of them will close down. Sub-post office staff delivered their
warning and that of three million customers, to Downing Street last month.
Sackfuls of signatures to a petition piled up outside Number Ten. But the
government says there are good reasons for introducing automatic credit
transfer - or ACT.
ALAN JOHNSON MP: It is a much better deal for the
tax payer and dramatically cheaper as it costs 79p to the tax payer to
cash a giro cheque, it costs 1p to the tax payer to pay the money into
ACT. It also eliminates around about a hundred, a hundred and fifty million
pounds worth of fraud every year at a stroke
VINCENT CABLE MP: We've already seen in the Romsey
constituency, which we won, there was a very, very strong public feeling
about this, that rural communities are going to be severely undermined
if they lose their post office branch. They've seen this happening over
many years and the process of decline will accelerate with ACT.
BILLINGTON: Recent bank closures have left
many people with no alternative to the post office in their area as a way
of getting hold of their money. If post offices close as a result of ACT
some MPs worry about people being left out.
TONY LLOYD MP: People who for different
reasons have never bothered with the banking system, have always operated
in the cash economy, who feel more comfortable drawing the benefits directly.
And we have to make sure that they don't end up having to travel long distances
or simply being put to ridiculous inconveniences to get access to their
own money.
BILLINGTON: So what will the government
do? The Federation of Sub-Postmasters Conference starts today - and the
Trade and Industry Minister Alan Johnson will address them on Tuesday.
He'll be able to tell them about some of the options available. But the
question is whether the government's preferred solution finds favour with
the sub-postmasters and their customers. The government's Performance and
Innovation Unit, the PIU, is supposed to be coming up with answers to the
problem. That weighty tome is such a long time in coming some fear it's
been lost in the post. The government has suggested that subsidy could
keep some of the most vulnerable Post Offices open.
JOHNSON: They are necessary for
all kinds of reasons, they will probably never make a profit, never be
able to operate commercially viably, in a commercially viable way, that
is where government subsidy may need to come in, to come in, that is what
the PIU will be looking at. But in a vast network like this you know that
is a fairly small proportion.
BILLINGTON: Chalgrove fulfils the stereotype
of a village with the Post Office at its heart. But in the pursuit of protecting
services in the countryside there are fears that help won't be forthcoming
to post offices that serve areas less photogenic and communities less articulate
about their troubles - places that don't tug at the collective heartstrings
of the country.
LLOYD: The emphasis has been on
the rural areas, the idyllic concept of village Britain, but an awful lot
of Britons don't live in idyllic villages they live in inner urban areas
and their needs have got to be met as well within this process, so politically
they must not be ignored. If you like there is a heartlands debate about
the post offices as well.
JOHNSON: We are looking to resolve
the problems particularly for rural communities but that doesn't mean to
say that post offices aren't as important, as important and sometimes more
important in urban areas and urban deprived areas in particular, so it
is not a rural urban issue it is a post office network issue.
BILLINGTON Customers already have access
to advice and information at their local post office. Rather than a handout
for the few, postmasters would prefer all branches to get financial recognition
for the services they currently offer for free.
CABLE: I think the issue we now
face is whether the government is just going to allocate subsidy to a handful
of high profile closures or whether he has a systematic programme of providing
this money in the form of additional income to postmasters and postmistresses
to keep the whole network functioning.
BILLINGTON: The Dome is supposed to be
the showcase for Britain's future and its innovative ideas and technology.
The sub-post office here is part of that showcase - in that it's fully
computerised - providing all the services currently on offer at your local
post office - and with the potential to deliver much more.
So can you explain what
you can do - what services you provide on this computer.
UNNAMED WOMAN: PMD is for pension allowances.
You can collect your pensions, your income support, green Giros and milk
tokens. Then we have utilities and bill payments.....
BILLINGTON: So you can pay your bills.......
UNNAMED WOMAN: You can pay all your bills with
a card. Then we have personal finances and you can also send moneygrams
from the Post Office.
BILLINGTON: So that's people paying in
and drawing money out......
UNNAMED WOMAN: Oh yes. You can actually pay in
and draw out. And then we have licences. You can buy game licences, fishing
licences as well as colour TV licences.
BILLINGTON: This automation could be the
starting point for a whole new kind of post office. Some people say the
best way of keeping Post Offices open is by making them more profitable
- by offering new services via new technology. But achieving this will
take time and money. What the sub Postmasters want to know is whether the
government is prepared to sign up to that vision.
BAKER: I see Sub Postmasters being
the general practitioners for government. Not only dispensing cash in the
form of benefits and payments for the Post Office account supported by
a banking package for other banks, but dispensing information, information
about what benefits people qualify for, what are those benefits? Passport
forms, driving licence forms, all this can be provided at your local post
office, this is where people want it where they live. On top of that we
could have a national lost property database, we can read documents for
the police. Only your brain forbids you from thinking what else a post
office can do, supported by this computerisation that we're currently putting
in.
BILLINGTON: But hi-tech doesn't necessarily
make money. The delivery of services would still have to be paid for -
by - guess who? the government. Half a billion pounds is being spent on
this modernisation - but however many new services they offer computers
on their own won't solve the problem.
CABLE: The post office network
is already investing substantially in new technology to enable post offices
to keep up with electronic switching, I mean that is going to happen.
It doesn't solve the immediate problem of the loss of income in the post
office network, they are getting new technology, but they need the income,
this is the core problem we keep coming back to.
BILLINGTON: The government has services
that must be made available - and post offices will soon have the means
to offer them. Everyone could be a winner if the government paid postmasters
to deliver.
DREW: What I want to see is individual
post masters and post mistresses paid a salary where they are undertaking
services on behalf of the State, or indeed undertaking those services which
clearly need support in order to keep them in place.
BROWNING: It's not a subsidy, it
is a payment for a specific service that has to be delivered. If the government
delivered it themselves, then there would be a cost to the tax payer, and
of course that's what happened with benefits payments, it was just that
the Post Offices received the repayment for carrying that out on behalf
of government, because the sub-post masters say to me; they don't want
government handouts, but what they do want are income streams and opportunities
to replace that income in a legitimate way.
BILLINGTON: Planning for their conference
the Federation of Sub-Postmasters would like to be upbeat about the minister's
address. But they know that their members won't be in the mood just for
warm words.
BAKER: I have worries that if the
Minister doesn't come and say what the delegates want to hear then it might
not get ugly, they could certainly express their dissatisfaction in a way
which we probably wouldn't enjoy but I don't see how we can head that off.
BILLINGTON: Their first concern is what
to do if the benefit changes hit before they are ready.
BAKER: We want to hear the Minister
say they are signed up for the vision and if we're not ready by 2003 then
they will delay their ACT plans until we are.
JOHNSON: I think it is a sensible
programme and I think we can meet that programme and we can meet it without
damaging the network and without the kind of closures the people have predicted.
BILLINGTON: It might be too late for Chalgrove's
post office and its postmen, who will have to travel to Oxford's sorting
office to work. But post office staff say the future of others could be
secured by an early government decision on a package of measures to help
them.
DREW: They want to see what is
going to be in the Performance Innovation Unit Report, and they want to
see the degree to which they are going to get support and the degree to
which the universal service obligation is going to be maintained. And I
hope he can make some indications about that but this is not going to be
a quick fix, this is going to be a long term strategy of making sure that
we keep sub post offices in existence.
LLOYD: I think we've got to say
that there are some services in society obviously things like our hospitals,
like our schools, which nobody would ever say could be operated without
recognition, that society pays to keep them there. Now I think whether
it's rural Britain or urban Britain, the same kind of argument does apply
for the post office.
BILLINGTON: The government might not want
to hand out bags of cash to every post office, but the whole network needs
more than a push start to modernise. Until a decision is made about how
to finance the future, other sub post offices will go the way of Chalgrove.
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