Royal Mail and the Post Office

At the height of the furore surrounding post office closures on the Isle of Wight, many of my constituents wrote to me voicing their concerns. For them, their local post office served not only as a place to collect pensions and to send letters, but as a vital source of social interaction. In many areas, the local post office is the nucleus of the community. Since the closures, I have received many complaints about people's difficulties in getting to their nearest post office and about the increased cost of doing so. Initially, when the closures were proposed, I wrote to the Post Office to ask why some, seemingly profitable, branches were destined for closure, but I failed to get any sort of sensible reply. When branches were eventually closed, I wrote again, asking it to provide me with documentary evidence to show that my concerns and my constituents' concerns had been taken into account when decisions to close branches were made, but no such evidence was available. I had made joint representations with the island's chamber of commerce and rural community council, but our concerns appear to have been completely ignored. When Lowtherville post office closed, my constituents were forced to go to the branch in Ventnor town centre. The road into the town has one of the steepest inclines in the country, so it is virtually impossible for elderly and disabled people to walk down the hill, let alone up it again, and they are unable to use the kneeling bus because the kerbs prevent it from working properly. The Post Office, however, knew nothing about the buses, and said that it was not responsible for public transport. In Meadow road, East Cowes, the Post Office could not prove that it had taken into account the fact that 500 houses were being built next to a closing branch. In Newport, Hunnyhill was a handy alternative to the central, very busy branch, so the central branch grew even busier when Hunnyhill closed. Surely it would have been better to resolve the difficulties faced by the Newport branch before closing Hunnyhill, but, again, there was no attempt to explain that. The proposed alternative to Calbourne post office was Brighstone. That is complete nonsense. To use a bus, as proposed by the Post Office, means a round journey of 20 miles. If it had investigated the matter, it would have found that a nearer post office is at Carisbrooke or Newport. Hence, with no direct bus route, my constituents find it difficult, time-consuming and costly to travel. In conclusion, the Post Office's scheme was ill-planned and insensitive to the needs of my constituents. The post office service is in an unusual position because it faces no competition and receives a great deal of public money as subsidy. My constituents deserve better.