JULY 14 – Ownership of the Post Office may very well be put into the fingers of its postmasters, the federal government has prompt, because it launched a public session over the way forward for the service.
The minister accountable, Gareth Thomas, mentioned it was time for “a contemporary imaginative and prescient” for the service, however mentioned the federal government didn’t plan to cut back the variety of branches.
The Post Office operates counters or retailers in additional than 11,500 places across the nation and is totally state-owned and subsidised by the taxpayer.
Plans for mutualisation have been underneath dialogue for greater than a decade, however had been sidelined because the scandal across the wrongful conviction of sub-postmasters unfolded.
The authorities mentioned it additionally wished to remodel the organisation’s tradition within the wake of the scandal which noticed a whole lot of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of false accounting and theft on the branches they had been operating on the premise of information from defective accountancy software program known as Horizon.
The scandal was introduced again into the highlight final week after the general public inquiry into what went incorrect revealed its first report, specializing in the influence on sub-postmasters and their households.
“We all know, sadly, the grim legacy… so that is about fixing the basic issues,” Thomas instructed the BBC.
The Post Office needed to be remodeled in order that it was trusted by its postmasters in addition to by most people once more, he mentioned.
But he mentioned he additionally wished the 12-week consultation to begin a nationwide debate over how the organisation must be run sooner or later, together with the choices of mutual possession or a constitution mannequin just like the BBC.
The session features a query over whether or not the Post Office ought to nonetheless be required to function 11,500 branches. However, Thomas mentioned the federal government believed the present measurement of the community was “broadly proper” and didn’t foresee closures.
The minister additionally introduced an additional £118m to assist the work already underneath option to ship modifications within the Post Office.
Future providers
As properly because the query of possession, the federal government is asking for views on what providers the Post Office ought to supply in future, with a selected concentrate on banking, as main lenders proceed to shut High Street branches.
Currently clients can use the Post Office to pay in and withdraw cash from accounts at most banks.
They should purchase overseas foreign money, choose up welfare profit kinds and funds, and submit passport functions. But the complete vary of providers are solely supplied at bigger websites.
Research revealed alongside the so-called Green Paper on the way forward for Post Office suggests it provides “social worth” of £5.2bn per 12 months to households and £1.3bn yearly to small and medium-sized companies.
But the enterprise has struggled to make a revenue, counting on tens of thousands and thousands of kilos of state subsidy, as clients posted fewer letters and turned to on-line providers and different supply operators, bypassing Post Office counters.
According to the Post Office, at present 99.7% of the inhabitants dwell inside three miles of a Post Office and 4,000 of its branches are open seven days every week.
By BBC
