Royal Mail under fire from MPs after strike chaos

13 Nov 09
The Royal Mail’s beleaguered Post Office division has been attacked by senior MPs as it struggles to recover from the dispute with postal workers
By Helen Mooney

13 November 2009

The Royal Mail’s beleaguered Post Office division has been attacked by senior MPs as it struggles to recover from the dispute with postal workers.

The pay and conditions row resulted in a series of strikes and a huge backlog of mail.

The main thrust of the criticism by the Public Accounts Committee, however, was reserved for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The MPs criticised the ‘distress and upheaval’ caused to rural and urban communities by the closure of post offices.

The government had shown a ‘real lack of concern’ for citizens in failing to adequately assess the social and economic costs of closing 2,500 outlets, said the report into the Post Office Network change programme, published on November 12.

The report found that a large proportion of the benefits of the programme and the annual savings were not being separately monitored.
‘Even if the forecast savings are achieved, there is still a need for Post Office Ltd to expand its government-related revenue if the network is to become financially sustainable,’ it warned.

PAC chair Edward Leigh said: ‘The consultation process appeared to the public as little more than a piece of window-dressing for a decision, which to all intents and purposes had already been taken.’
He said the department had failed to clarify what  a sustainable post office network would look like. It should set out its expectations concerning the size, spread and composition of the network, he added.

‘In view of the distress and upheaval caused to rural and urban communities by the closure programme and the less than impressive financial benefits – a forecast saving of £45m a year from 2011/12, following a loss of £17m in each of the five preceding years – compulsory closures of post offices should in future be a last resort, not a first,’ he added.

In 2007, the then Department of Trade and Industry and Post Office Ltd agreed a £1.7bn plan to make the network financially sustainable. This included a £150m annual subsidy. One element of this plan was the Network Change Programme, which envisaged the closure of up to 2,500 post office branches.

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