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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