Village life faces a fresh threat

THE village postmaster is many things. Friend, gossip, source of information. Someone you visit to buy stamps or a pint of milk, to collect your pension or renew your car tax.

What he hadn't been until yesterday was the voice of militant protest.

All that changed when hundreds of postmasters and postmistresses from across the country descended on Downing Street with a single message: Save Our Post Offices.

Under cover of a sea of red umbrellas, they handed over a petition signed by four million people - believed by campaigners to be the largest domestic petition presented to a Prime Minister.

What is at stake, sub-postmasters say, is the very future of the village post office - and with it a rural way of life.

Speaking by mobile phone from outside Downing Street, Helmsley sub-postmaster Geoff Simpson, who was among the hundreds to have made the journey to London yesterday, said the village post office was a vital hub of the community. It was a lifeline for those, such as the elderly, who were unable to get out of their village to local towns and cities.

"If you live in a village or small community, you soon realise that the post office is the centre and hub of village life," he said.

"It is a public noticeboard for the village. It is where people meet. It is somewhere to pick up a few groceries or a pint of milk. And the postmaster is there to help. You soon realise, for example, that somebody may not be well if they haven't been in at their normal time, and you'd go to help."

The trouble is that rural post-offices are closing at a frightening rate.

The number of sub post offices across the country has fallen from 18,393 in 1999 to just over 14,000 last year.

Across North Yorkshire alone, 20 rural post offices closed in 2004, a further five last year, and 11 this year already, according to Coun Shelagh Marshall, North Yorkshire County Council's older person's champion.

The loss of the village post office has a devastating effect on elderly people in particular, Coun Marshall said.

"Older people are worst affected by post office closures - and more so on retirement when they live some miles from a town, supermarket and bank: in other words a considerable distance from accessing cash, even for their pension and disabled benefits," she said.

Anyone living in a village which had recently lost its post office would soon notice the difference, Mr Simpson said. "It feels as if part of the village has been taken out."

Yesterday's petition and demonstration was sparked by a Government decision to withdraw the Post Office Card Account (POCA) used by millions of people to access pensions and benefits.

Mr Simpson stressed that was the last straw. Over recent years, sub post offices had been stripped of much of their key business by the Government, he said.

They could no longer renew TV licences, and were facing increased competition for renewing car tax discs as the Government went all out to promote online and telephone car tax renewal.

"Until recently, 60 to 70 per cent of the work we get - card accounts, TV licences, motor vehicle licences - was provided by the Government," Mr Simpson said. He added that in two years' time, when the card account system is die to end, "that will be down to ten per cent. We are all living on a knife edge. We don't know whether we're going to have jobs or a post office next year".

Postmasters are demanding that the Government:

Mr Simpson said the Government should also be putting pressure on banks to allow post offices to offer a cash withdrawal service for more customers. The number of banks allowing their customers to use post offices to withdraw cash was too limited, he said.

Postmasters weren't asking for the earth. "We just want a level playing field. We want out customers to have the opportunity to decide if they want a card account, or to decide if they want to use their post office to get their motor vehicle licence."

Postmasters are not alone in calling on the Government to save post offices.

Local MPs were queuing up yesterday to have their say.

Ryedale Tory MP John Greenway said rural post offices were hugely important to those who had a limited ability to get around, such as the elderly, or the mothers of young children who had no access to a car while their husbands were at work.

The village post office and village shop were often one and the same, he pointed out - and if a post office was no longer viable, the village shop would often go, too.

Fellow Tory Anne McIntosh said she was launching her own campaign to save local post offices. She claimed that since 1999, 19 local post offices had closed in her Vale of York constituency.

"Post offices are a vital lifeline for local villages and I will campaign for their vibrant future," she said.

Harrogate Liberal Democrat MP Phil Willis added: "Too many local post offices have already closed. How many more will go, now it seems the Government's solution to stabilise' the post office will involve thousands more branch closures, bringing hardship and financial exclusion to millions."

For Ryedale Liberal councillor John Clark, whose local post office in Cropton closed not long ago, the decline of rural post offices is a symptom of a wider crisis in rural life dating back to the closure of rural branch railway lines by Beeching in the 1960s.

Rural housing, transport, jobs and shops were all in decline, he said. As a result, the younger gen-eration was moving away to find work and affordable homes, and elderly people to get access to proper services.

"It is a malaise," said Coun Clark. "Rural communities are becoming a play area and dormitory for well-off city workers."

The view that profitability should be the only factor deciding which local services should be retained for a community was wrong-headed, Coun Clark said.

"We've had 40 years of going in the wrong direction," he said. "We need to take a view of society and of the collective community."

But does it really matter if our villages become dormitories for the wealthy? Things change, after all.

"It doesn't matter if you don't believe in society," Coun Clark said.

"It doesn't matter if you believe that youngsters should lose contact with their parents, if you think that elderly people should have to migrate out of an area they may have lived in all their lives because they cannot continue to live there.

"It doesn't matter if you have the view that we should all be buzzing around like demented bees in cars in vast numbers, always needing to be somewhere else because you don't have the services locally that you need."

What the Prime Minister said yesterday

SPEAKING at Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, Mr Blair ruled out any increase in the state subsidy to support the post office network, which he said was running at £150 million a year and had totalled £2 billion since 1997.

"Of course we will look at all the options, but what we won't be able to do is to say there is more subsidy available than the amount we are already putting in," he said.

Mr Blair said he understood that phasing out the Post Office Card accounts was a concern to people.

"But the reason there is a problem is that more and more people are using bank accounts rather than the post office and it is important, therefore, to realise that there is a process of change that any Government would have to handle in this situation," he said.

The postal network