Union boss describes closures plan by scandal-hit business as ‘immoral’, as 115 Crown Post Offices are to go and 1,000 workers face redundancy
In the latest low blow to blighted Croydon High Street, the Post Office has this morning confirmed that its Croydon branch is among the 115 that it is closing to reduce costs to secure its financial future.
Days are numbered: Croydon’s town centre Post Office is one of 115 to be closed or disposed of
Croydon’s main Post Office, located close to the busy junction with George Street, provides services far more complex than simply the selling of postage stamps, as they handle pensions payments, gas meter top-ups, out-of-hours banking payemtns, driving licence and passport applications and a range of other, quasi-governmental bits of form-filling essential for life in 21st Century Britain.
The closure of the Croydon main Post Office will strip the long-blighted High Street of one last reason for people to bother visiting the town centre.
The Post Office is – or was – the largest retailer in the country, often providing an anchor for communities, offering mail and banking services to approximately 6million small businesses.
The locations that have been earmarked for closure – which also include Brixton, Clapham Common, Kennington Park and London Bridge branches – are the last remaining sites that are directly owned by the Post Office. They are known as Crown Post Offices. There were almost 400 in 2012.
The Post Office said the affected branches could be transferred to retail partners or postmasters – which means they may not all close. But a mass dump of 115 prime sites when the retail sector has been in steady decline for three decades is hardly conducive to a stable handover of properties.
More than just selling stamps: the Post Office is often a hub of communities
There are about 11,500 Post Office branches across the country, of which 115 are centrally owned. The rest are operated by independent post office operators under contract and partners such as WH Smith and Tesco.
The closures announcement comes while the Post Office remains embroiled in the sub-postmasters scandal, in which hundreds of innocent independent, private businesspeople who ran Post Offices were persecuted, some prosecuted, because of a failing Horizon computerised payments system.
“For the company to announce the closure of hundreds of Post Offices hot on the heels of the Horizon scandal is as tone deaf as it is immoral,” said Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union. The Post Office closures have come accompanied with the probability of more than 1,000 job losses from its head office staff.
“CWU members are victims of the Horizon scandal – and for them to now fear for their jobs ahead of Christmas is yet another cruel attack,” Ward said.
Closure announcement: Post Office chair Nigel Railton
Nigel Railton, the chair of the Post Office, made the closures announcement this morning. He said “The Post Office has a 360-year history of public service and today we want to secure that service for the future by learning from past mistakes and moving forward for the benefit of all postmasters.
“We can, and will, restore pride in working for a business with a legacy of service, rather than one of scandal. The value postmasters deliver in their communities must be reflected in their pockets, and this Transformation Plan provides a route to adding more than £250million annually to total postmaster remuneration by 2030, subject to government funding.”
Croydon High Street’s Post Office falls within the Croydon West constituency of Labour’s Sarah Jones, who also happens to be the Minister of State for industry in Keir Starmer’s government. This week her colleague, Jonathan Reynolds MP, the Business Secretary, said, “The Post Office is still an incredibly important institution in national life. As an institution, as a brand, there is still tremendous affection and desire for the Post Office to have a strong future.”
Inside Croydon asked MP Jones for a comment on the Croydon Post Office closure. We had received no response by the time of publication.
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
I WAS SHOCKED TO HEAR THAT THE MAIN POST OFFICE IN CROYDON IS TO GO LEAVING THE PEOPLE OF CROYDON WITH NO POST OFFICE AT ALL TO GO TO I USE TO USE THIS POST OFFICE TO WITHDRAW MONEY FROM MY NATIONWIDE CURRENT ACCOUNT WHAT IS HAPPENNING TO CROYDON WHAT WITH THE LOSS OF ALL OUR LOCAL COMPANIES EMPTY SHOPS AND STORES IN THE TOWN KATHERINE STREET IN CROYDON LOOKS LIKE A DIRELICT OLD DUMP AND IF SOMETHING IS NOT DONE SOON THE BUILDINGS IN KATHERINE STREET WILL COLLAPSE BY THEMSELVES I HAD BEEN THINKING OF MOVING AWAY FROM CROYDON WHEN I RETIRE IN SIX MONTHS TIME NOW IT IS BECOMING A CERTAINTY .
ARE YOU GOING TO MOVE TO MILTON KEYNES STEVEN THATS GOOD NEWS FOR THE PEOPLE OF CROYDON AND THE READERS OF INSIDE CROYDON THAT IS IT SHOWS THAT EVERY CLOUD HAS A SILVER LINING ONE THING I AM CURIOUS ABOUT IS WHY YOU WENT TO THE POST OFFICE TO WITHDRAW MONEY FROM YOUR NATIONWIDE CURRENT ACCOUNT INSTEAD OF GOING TO THE NATIONWIDE BUILDING SOCIETY IN GEORGE STREET BY THE TRAMSTOP INCIDENTALLY THE NAME OF THE STREET YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT IS SPELT KATHARINE STREET AND WHILE SOME MIGHT WISH IT I CANNOT SEE THE TOWN HALL CENTRAL LIBRARY AND SPREAD EAGLE COLLAPSING ANY TIME SOON PERHAPS YOU ARE GETTING CONFUSED BECAUSE THE POST OFFICE WHOSE CLOSURE THIS LABOUR GOVERNMENT ARE GOING TO DO NOTHING ABOUT IS ACTUALLY IN THE HIGH STREET
dear arfur towcrate the reason i used the post office for my banking is because it was easier for me also i did not mean the town hall central library and spread eagle from collapsing in croydon i meant the bank on the corner of katharine street croydon st georges walk and the nestle office building yes you are correct the post office is in the high street croydon but as i mentioned in my letter we seem to be losing a lot of other things in croydon
Thanks for your comment, Stephen.
A request one final time: please use the caps lock properly, or we shall simply have to bin any future comments from you.
I recommend levering off the caps lock key and throwing it away. I did it years ago and it changed my life. Caps Lock keys serve no useful purpose on a computer keyboard – they are a hangover from the early years of Steven Downes’ journalistic career on old-fashioned typewriters
What’s a typewriter?
Machines to craft words on with brilliant names including, Remington, Imperial, Olivetti, Royal, Smith Corona, Underwood, Adler and Olympia
Always a shame when more services leave the centre, this seemed like a well subscribed Post Office whenever I’ve gone in with queues outside most mornings. If the facilities will be subsumed inside the nearby WH Smiths or similar it may have limited impact, hopefully they won’t be expecting the existing neighbourhood POs in the borough to pick up the slack.
It is all a great shame.
If a town of 300,000 people can’t sustain a post office then where exactly does the post office think can? There are so many services the Central PO provides that aren’t provided by smaller local POs (and it would be impractical for them to do so). As someone who doesn’t drive this is a huge issue.
Whenever I walk past the Post Office in the High Street it looks to be busy or very busy. Just based on that this closure does not make sense.
This is such a perverse decision. This is the busiest post office in Croydon. There’s always a massive queue. It’s also the only place you can buy correct sized 2kg post boxes for airmail. How can it not be making money? This is like a Theatre closing its box office. Utterly crackers. This is going to be so inconvenient for the many people with relatives abroad. What, is everyone going to go down the sub post office? Absolutely crackers… If you go at 10 am on a Saturday there’s always a 9 deep queue for the counter… Where are we supposed to drop parcels off? The dump?