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Every community in the capital needs a post office
• I read in one newspaper that the ‘Royal Mail bosses raked in £4.5 million in bonuses last year – more than enough to bail out the 169 London post offices facing closure.
This is a disgrace and an insult to people living in London. What has happened to the idea of service in this country? Why are ordinary people being cheated?
Every community in London needs a post office.
In particular I should like to point out that the Crowndale post office is a necessity for Somers Town.
The Royal College Street post office was closed with the excuse that the Crowndale post office served the area well.
And indeed it does. It is meticulously organised and gives most people who visit it a sense of their place in the community.
The Camden Town post office is too far away for elderly people to visit.
If people from Somers Town have no alternative but to go there it will be more crowded than ever.
As it is the Camden Town post office has queues almost all day, every day they’re open. Most ordinary people have to go to the post themselves, whereas the bosses have office juniors to deal with their affairs such as posting letters and parcels.
Judging from the present queueing time, they will have to wait at least an hour in a queue. What does this do for productivity? What is the government thinking about?
I heard a well-founded rumour that post offices are to be moved into libraries.
What a travesty for libraries too. Libraries, as the computer age has found out, are not dispensable.
Reading is an essential form of education for everyone in every community, and to read and study effectively distractions should be at a minimum.
Adding post offices to libraries would be disastrous. In any case we are having to fight to keep our libraries for books, yes books.
To get rid of post offices is to deny every taxpayer the right to an egalitarian way of conducting financial business without necessarily having to engage in bank transactions incurring, soon, charges for current accounts, or pay over the odds for privatised postal services.
The Royal Mail was once something of which this nation was proud; it was the first public service for the community.
How can we admire a service that pays more attention to its bosses than it does to the people it serves?
It is time for the government to turn the Post Office into a service for the community.
Angela Inglis
Address supplied
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