Post Office campaigners claim 'moral victory'

Nov 14 2009 by Alastair Craig, The Journal

THE consultation on closure of 2,500 post offices around the country was branded a sham by a watchdog earlier this week. Alastair Craig talks to campaigners in the region about their “moral victory”.

THEIR Post Offices may have closed, but campaigners are claiming a moral – though they admit hollow – victory over the Government.

Westminster has been accused of showing a "lack of concern" for people affected by the thousands of branch shut-downs in recent years.

A panel of MPs making up the in-house financial watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), this week labelled the consultation process last year as "window dressing" for a decision that had already been made to axe Post Offices on the infamous hit-list.

Those sentiments reported echo the arguments made at the time of the last swinging cuts by almost every postmaster and postmistress in the doomed branch network.

After weeks of consultations in the North East, only one branch survived the postal equivalent of death row and 80 sites across Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and County Durham were told to prepare for their last day’s trading.

One of the unlucky ones was Crookhill Post Office, in Ryton, Gateshead, which was run by Malcolm and Julie Dance.

When their branch was given the closure order last summer, they had just six weeks to wind up postal operations to meet the October 2008 deadline.

Julie, 38, who still runs a village shop with her husband at the same site, says the PAC’s critical review comes too late, but vindicates their protests that closures were a "done deal". She said: "The decision to close was done and dusted. We said that all along but the Government refused to listen. It looks like we have been shown to be right.

"The consultation was a formality the Government had to go through, but it was just that, a formality. No account was taken of our views."

The PAC, which includes Labour’s Phil Wilson, MP for Sedgefield, has now called on the Government and the Post Office to improve consultations over future closures to prevent the process being brought into disrepute.