It’s Not Over Yet!

With the closure of Great Gidding Post Office now possibly weeks away the residents of the village, and surrounding villages, are now faced with a difficult decision.

Do we continue to fight the closure of the Post Office in Great Gidding by obstructing the placement of the Outreach vehicle (the proposed mobile ‘Post Office’ that visits the village once a day for an hour at a time), or do we acquiesce and find the most sensible place (and sensible hours) for the Outreach service to visit?

In a nutshell Post Office Ltd are not easily able to close Great Gidding Post Office without providing an alternative service. As stated in earlier posts we are more than 5 miles from our nearest alternative Post Offices, at Sawtry and Oundle, which leaves Great Gidding and its surrounding villages remote from any Post Office services - too remote to be able to withdraw the services which many villagers require.

So this weekend the Great Gidding Post Office Closure Action Group have sent a questionnaire to the villagers asking their opinion. The emotional reaction is, of course, to oppose the placement of the Outreach vehicle and thus fight to keep our existing Post Office.

Is this how you want to visit your Post Office?

The proposed placement for the Outreach vehicle is to park it on the off-road piece of land in front of the main entrance to the Recreation field. This is a poor position with regard to safety, both for pedestrians and vehicles. The proposed placement is very close to busy crossroads and to a tight bend on the Winwick Road. It is also opposite the proposed entrance for the new Primary school.

As a result the Leisure and Amenities Committee are writing separately to Post Office Ltd to resist this site. Similarly the alternative position at the Village Hall Car Park is not ideal because of restricted pedestrian access and would, thus, also be resisted.

But we have, also, to bear in mind that restricting the Outreach vehicle from the village completely might, ultimately, leave the village with no Post Office facilities at all! We would then have deprived such residents as require weekly access to the Post Office with no alternative but to find some way of visiting Sawtry or Oundle.

So the questionnaire has three options:

1. Do nothing and let Post Office Ltd choose a location for the Outreach vehicle.

2. Keep fighting to retain the present Post Office (but be aware that there is a risk that we might end up with nothing, not even Outreach).

3. Negotiate with Post Office Ltd to find a more suitable location for Outreach, with more flexible hours.

Post Office Ltd is empowered to shut down Great Gidding Post Office from the 14th October. We need your answers now! So please fill out the questionnaire and either hand it in to your collector or drop it in at the shop.

Closure Decision - September 17th 2008

We have just learnt the bad news that Great Gidding Post Office has not had a reprieve from closure.

Despite the evidence presented by the Action Group concerning the poor access and distance of the nearest alternative PO in Sawtry, 5.6 miles away, the reliance on Great Gidding Post Office by residents of the village and surrounding villages, and the support by over 30 local businesses in the area, it seems that the axe was always destined to fall. What a pity.

Of concern to us all, as well, is the viability of the local shop which accompanies the Post Office. This, in its own way, is a lifeline to the community delivering papers and magazines, supplying necessities like milk and stationery, and being a local hub of information.

You might think that the shop could survive without the Post Office, and let’s hope it can. But you have to bear in mind that the shop gained much of its trade because of the Post Office. Visitors who called in to post a letter or parcel, collect their pension or pay their bills or use it as a local bank invariably bought something from the shop as well. Without that passing trade the income of the shop might fall to the point where it is unviable.

What a pity! In a way we can’t blame the Post Office entirely for this closure. The responsibility for closures reflects on the Government and its policy regarding Post Office profitability. Who would have thought that a supposedly socialist Government would have brought such an action?

Beginning of the end

Not since the Beeching plan, which closed a huge raft of rural railways in Britain and forever crippled our rail network, has there been such a drastic cull of a major public service as we are seeing in the proposed closure of 6,500 Post Offices throughout both rural and urban areas.

With the Post Office network estimated to lose £4 million per week it would seem common business sense to close the only unprofitable branch of the Royal Mail. This, however, is missing two major aspects of the ‘business’ that includes Royal Mail and the Post Office.

First the Post Office, since the 1900s has always been viewed by both Government and public alike as a ’service’ to the community. It has been a means of dissemination of information to the public as well as a method of providing advice on official services.

It seems that this concept of ’service’  is no longer deemed important. Service to the community in terms of public information - service to rural residents providing pensions and other facilities for those who cannot travel - service, in fact, on the point of helping people.

Secondly, if the Post Office is to run as a business, it requires outlets for its services. Cut these outlets and you automatically cut the level of business. This is a common factor for all businesses. For a business to survive it needs customers to access its services and, therefore, those customers require access points. The Post Offices are access points. Close them and you drive customers away!

In the case of Great Gidding and its surrounding villages there is no option for customers of the Post Office. Both Sawtry and Oundle Post Offices are over 5 miles away - no-one is going to take more than a 10 mile round trip to either alternative Post Office.

In addition the closest Post Office, Sawtry, has only six parking places situated on a busy road. As the Post Office is next to the Cooperative Supermarket, access by car is nigh on impossible!

The Post Office claims that it will replace Great Gidding PO with an Outreach service. This is a van that visits the village once a day during weekdays for an hour. Stupidly the time it visits varies each day! Do they really think that anyone is going to remember the times it will call?

Furthermore the evidence from other villages throughout the UK whose Post Offices have already closed is that the Outreach service is just a sop to appease disgruntled villagers. Because the Outreach service is under-utilised it is usually withdrawn after around 6 months. And that’s the end of the Post Office.

Post Office in the 21st Century

Since before the World Wars the Post Office has been the centre of most communities. During the 20th Century successive Governments used the Post Office to disseminate official information and provide means of licensing of everything from dogs to TV and radio, payment for essential services, collection of benefits such as pension payments, and provision of necessary forms like passport applications.

Because of this central role the Post Office sub-postmasters and their staff normally knew local residents intimately, especially in rural areas, and were able to offer personal advice and provide an extraordinary level of localised information.

Unfortunately all this comes at a cost. Since the turn of the millenium many services have been withdrawn from the Post Office including TV licensing. Revenue from Government transactions fell by £168m in 2005/6. In addition the Government has committed to encouraging competition to the Post Office for postal services. Since 2000 private companies have been able to compete with the Royal Mail in the bulk mail (business based) market. From 2006 the local collection and delivery of mail has also been open to competition. That means that licensed companies are able to collect, sort and deliver mail to customers.

Despite all these changes the Royal Mail still has over a 97% share of mail services. It is not the Royal Mail that is losing money - overall the regulator, Postcomm, has estimated that 6500 Post Offices are run at a loss. The Government subsidy for Post Offices was £150m last year but this grant ended in March 2008.

Will closures continue?

There have already been over 4000 Post Office closures since 1999. There is a further target of 2500 closures by the end of 2008. However it is quite possible that further services, like the Post Office Card Account (banking service), will be withdrawn from the Post Office before 2010. As these services are withdrawn we might expect that more Post Offices will become ‘unprofitable’ resulting in a further round of closures.

Background to Post Office Closures

Why are The Post Office so adamant that 2500 Post Offices have to close? Here’s the background…

In 2006/7 The Post Office lost more than £200 million. The change to the way Post Offices are used has been largely responsible for a massive reduction in the number of visits to both rural and urban Post Offices.

It is all too easy to blame increasing use of the Internet and communication via email for these losses. However, as we’ll see later, this is an easy excuse to cover up what have been dramatic changes in the facilities available from Post Offices nationwide.

First of all it is worth pointing out that the Post Office is a service not a business. When the Penny Post was first introduced nationally in 1840 it was only as a result of Rowland Hill’s ‘Post Office Reform’. The public were becoming increasingly concerned about the rising costs of the postal service, the government of the time using postal revenues as a form of tax.

Rowland Hill pointed out that distance had very little effect on the cost of conveying a letter from one place to another. The majority of cost was involved in the personal delivery of letters where the postage had to be collected by the postman at the time of delivery. The cost of sending a letter from London to Birmingham was 8d (old pence) while from London to Liverpool was 11d. Rowland Hill’s suggestion was that, by affixing a pre-paid ’stamp’ on the letter, massive savings in postal deliveries could be made.

Initially Parliament voted for a Fourpenny post for letters up to half an ounce in weight and the pre-paid rate was made by a handwritten mark (see red line on letter cover picture left). This lasted only from December 1839 until January 1840 when the Uniform Penny Post came into force. Rowland Hill’s concept proved immensely popular, the number of letters sent increasing from 76 million in 1839 up to 168 million in 1840 and an incredible 347 million in 1841. The gummed pre-paid label, now know as the Penny Black stamp was introduced in May 1840.

During the First World War the penny letter rate was extended across the Empire as the Government quickly realised the importance of maintaining communication across continents. Even as late as 1934-1938 the ‘Empire Airmail Scheme’ provided the means of sending letters anywhere in the British Empire for the same cost as the inland letter rate (one and a halfpence for a one ounce letter).

These schemes could only have come about because of Government subsidy. Nobody could claim that sending a letter from London to Sydney by airmail for a penny-ha’penny was cost effective!

Save Our Post Office

Drive up and down Great Gidding Main Street and you’ll see posters in every window exclaiming ‘Save Gidding Post Office’.

Why is our village so up in arms about the threatened closure of our Post Office?

We have set out to explore all the reasons why in this website. But here, to begin with, is a background to the important part the Post Office plays in our community.

Great Gidding and Little Gidding is a parish situated 12 miles from Huntingdon in a largely agricultural area. The farming background engenders a spirited community including local businesses as diverse as Financial Management through to Graphic Design. Our village includes two churches, a pub, a primary school, a village hall, a recreation (sports) field, stabling and tack shop and a village shop all serving around 300 inhabitants.

What this doesn’t tell you, however, is the importance of Great and Little Gidding to the surrounding villages. Hamerton, Winwick, Luddington and Glatton are all within a few miles of the ‘Giddings’ and residents use the facilities in the village regularly.

Our village shop is one of the reasons that residents of the area around the ‘Giddings’ visit the village, particularly as the village shop is also the Post Office!

Local businesses, residents (children, parents and grandparents) can be seen using the shop and Post Office at all times of the day. Pensioners still collect their pensions from the Post Office; local businesses take in letters and parcels daily; children and parents manage their banking through the Post Office.

With all that in mind you may wonder why Post Offices Ltd wants to close the Great Gidding Post Office? So do we all?

Read on to find out…