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How can the Post Office ignore the views of so many people?
• SO the government’s “consultation” on the future of our post offices has ended and the conclusions have been published.
We in Belsize are to lose our last sub-post office despite thousands of residents signing our petition to save it and despite our reasoned objections:
1. We had three sub-post offices in Belsize until recently all of which were much-loved and much-used.
2. The Post Office was negotiating with the newsagent on Haverstock Hill to reopen a sub-post office there, but that negotiation was summarily ended on the day the “consultation” was announced.
3. There is no public transport to the two alternatives the Post Office has suggested – Queens Crescent and Regent’s Park Road.
4. Anyone wishing to walk to the Regent’s Park Road post office would need to climb over Primrose Hill.
5. Hampstead Post Office, which is seen by many as the next closest facility, is a long walk up a steep hill.
6. Businesses in Englands Lane that need to send parcels will now have to drive elsewhere, causing carbon emissions and pollution.
7. In Belsize ward there are 660 under-5s, 1,524 people with limiting long-term illness, 763 lone-pensioner households and 50.5 per cent of households with no car or van.
8. And 18.3 per cent of households within 1km of the Englands Lane sub-post office, that is 317 households, are within the “welfare borderline” category typified by their reliance on post offices as somewhere to pay bills and obtain benefits.
9. Within 200 yards of the Englands Lane sub-post office there is an older people’s sheltered housing block the residents of which will be disadvantaged by closure and lack of an easily accessible alternative.
10. Around 150 young families are resident in Englands Lane Hostel nearby with many dependent on this branch for access to benefit payments through their Post Office Card Accounts.
In all my adult life I’ve only known two policies as unpopular as this Labour government’s death by a thousand cuts approach to the Post Office network. They were the poll tax, which destroyed Margaret Thatcher, and the Iraq War, which finished off Tony Blair.
Beware Gordon Brown – the bell tolls for thee!
Cllr Alexis Rowell
Liberal Democrat,
Belsize ward
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