POST OFFICE CLOSURES
Or rather, next week is no post office week for some, at least, of
West Dorset villages.
On 15 July, we will hear the grim news about the post offices Post
Office Headquarters intends to close locally.
As regular readers of this column will be well aware, I firmly believe
that such closures will be a disastrous mistake. Village post
offices, and the village shops whose footfall they so importantly
sustain, provide not only a lifeline for many villagers who find it
difficult to get to town but also an invaluable part of the glue that
holds village communities together.
No doubt there will be protests – and I shall be joining in them. But
the evidence from other parts of the country gives no cause for
optimism about the willingness of Post Office Headquarters to listen
to such protests. I am not aware of a single rural post office that
has been reprieved as a result of the "consultation". What is more,
the "consultation" period (of six weeks, mainly during the August
holiday period) suggest that no-one is intending to take what we have
to say very seriously.
But all is not doom and gloom.
Post Office Headquarters have made clear that they are willing to do
business with us if we can find ways of saving them the same amount of
money they would save by closing the post office, whilst keeping the
post office open. And, as usual, people all over West Dorset are
showing every sign of being willing to work together to achieve
exactly that result. The County Council, the District Council, Dorset
Community Action, the Village & Retail Shops Association and large
numbers of parish councils have all indicated that they are willing to
help construct a rescue plan for as many as possible of the threatened
post offices.
It is encouraging that people locally care so much, and that people
from different organisations are willing to lay aside all
institutional and political rivalries to do their best for our lovely
bit of rural Britain.
What we need now is a bit of imagination, a bit of luck and a lot of
hard work. Out of these three ingredients, I feel sure we can bake
some very tasty rescue plans. Who knows, we may even end up by a
strengthening of the community spirit which these local post offices
do so much to sustain. It would be naïve to suppose that this was the
plan of the people who proposed the closure programme. But the rain-
makers sometimes provide silver linings as well as clouds.