| |
Post office protests galore but our politicians are failing us
• THE latest New Journal featured two eloquent testimonies to the decline of our postal services: the article by former postman Don Ryan and the powerful letter from Lord Clarke of Hampstead, himself also a former post office worker (March 5).
We have protested at the closure of local post offices for four years, and similar campaigns have taken place all over the country. The public now deserves and expects urgent action to restore badly damaged services.
Locally, all four sub-post offices in the Belsize area have been closed. At Finchley Road, queues of up to 30 persons are a daily experience.
One of us recently witnessed two incidents at Finchley Road: a violent argument with racist undertones about priority in the queue and the collapse of an elderly woman who required medical attention.
Collection and delivery services continue to deteriorate.
You cannot tell from a pillar box when – or whether – mail has been collected.
There are no collections at all on Sundays and the Saturday collection at noon leaves no time to dispatch any urgent reply; deliveries arrive as late as three in the afternoon.
Misdeliveries (wrong house, wrong postcode) are common. We hear of threats to close the local sorting office. Letters to Post Office management are ignored.
Last autumn, some local authorities (Essex for example) were looking at ways of saving their post office branches, and Lord Mandelson declared that local post offices could make an important contribution to the revival of an ailing economy.
But has anything actually happened? Nothing will happen unless national and local government is now prepared to be proactive, seeking premises for branch offices and installing trained managers and workers. We continue to wait suspensefully for some signs from MPs and the council.
ALAN BROWNJOHN
Gene Adams
Belsize Post Office Users Action Group
NW3
|
 |
|
|
| |
| |
