As euphemisms go, it is not very convincing. Royal Mail Group yesterday confirmed to The Herald details of the programme being put in place by its subsidiary, Post Office Ltd,
for urban reinvention. Reinvention implies being creative and positive. Royal Mail has proved it is not averse to linguistic invention because its programme is about contraction and the closure of post offices in Scotland. When fully implemented, it could result in the disappearance of perhaps 40% of the country's urban post offices. This will seem depressingly familiar to those who campaigned long and hard to fight against the threat to Scotland's rural post offices. These provide lifeline services to rural areas and most should survive because the government has promised to provide (pounds) 450m over a three-year period to support the network.
The new threat is to urban post offices. Nearly 20 have already shut in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Royal Mail wants to close another 45 across both cities. Its plans for reducing provision in Aberdeen, Stirling, and Dundee are expected soon. Ultimately, 250 of Scotland's 691 urban post offices could go. Royal Mail, a business owned by the state but no longer run by it, is losing some (pounds) 3m-a-week and wants to operate the urban
post office network as a commercial business. It believes there are too many urban branches to make that aim viable.
It is the responsibility of any business to stem losses and turn them into profit but post offices are no ordinary business, even in urban areas. The
closure programme is likely to hit the disadvantaged and the elderly hardest, partly because it coincides with
government plans to pay benefits directly into bank or building society accounts in 2005. From then, the recipients of benefit will have no choice in the matter. The change will perhaps be seen as the writing on the wall for those post offices where the payment of benefit accounts for up to 50% of turnover. With that gone, what will be left? The people who run these post offices could not be blamed for applying to close to take advantage of a compensation package worth two years' salary ((pounds) 56,000 on average).
It is what happens to those left behind, particularly elderly customers, that matters. It is estimated that thousands of old folk in Scotland do not have bank accounts. For someone in their seventies or eighties, opening a bank account for the first time (even finding a bank at a time of branch closures) would perhaps be an insurmountable challenge. Many elderly people like collecting their pension at the post office because of the personal service, and the link with the community, the weekly activity provides.
It is a social glue that should not be casually discarded for commercial gain. Royal Mail has promised that 95% of people in urban areas will live no further than a mile from the nearest branch at the end of the closure programme. That promise will have a hollow ring for the elderly and infirm who have neither a car nor access to one. Royal Mail has set its targets. Meeting them could result is a second-class service, or no service, for the most vulnerable.
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