The long, slow and premature death of the Post Office has been agonising to observe. Never has “death by a thousand cuts” been more apposite than the deliberate destruction of a once-proud service into the shabby shell of a business it is now.
The litter-strewn floor of my scruffy and dimly-lit local branch is now squashed behind a Lebara phone merchant. As you join the long queue amid the discarded Coke cans and lottery scratchcards, you have time to scrutinise what is being advertised in the Post Office.
The £100 payday loan advert from “Rhodes Finance” has outlasted the lender itself, which appears to be defunct. Nearby, a machine begs me to “buy and sell crypto instantly”. I’d have more confidence in the spiritualist who, I’m told, also used to advertise there.
After trying to make sense speaking through screens (where staff wearily try to up-sell something or other), you’re expected to deposit your parcel in an open-access window that almost invites thieves to walk off with your returned Amazon box.
How different from the town-centre post office of my childhood, a grand and elegant high-ceilinged affair which sold not just stamps but represented the connection between the state and the citizen. It was where I sorted out my first passport and my first driving licence, where my dad paid his TV licence and my grandad picked up his pension.
Yes, of course we’re not sending letters like we used to. But need the business have sunk as low as it has? Unlike my bank branch, which I very rarely visit, there are still plenty of reasons to go to a post office. It can be the only explanation for the long queues. My elderly parents still cash their pension at one of the “agency” offices carved out of a tawdry convenience store, but feel more insecure on every visit.
In what the Post Office calls “continuing modernisation” it continues to close standalone branches. Half of all post offices have shut since the early 1980s, although the pace of closures has now declined. One of the latest to go is the Walthamstow branch in east London. It will shift to a “designated area” at the rear of an ageing mini-market which appears almost designed to deter you going there.
It’s not just Britain that is struggling with what to do with the post office network. In Ireland, An Post last week pressed self-destruct on 159 rural post offices that will be the death-knell for scores of remoter communities.
But there is something very old fashioned that could yet save post offices. They’re called notes and coins. A senior banker this week told me of how the bank branch closure programme evolved: when the banks were told that there had to be at least one branch left in every sizeable location, it actually accelerated closures, as each bank raced to avoid being the last one left.
A similar process is at work with cash machines: banks are desperately shutting theirs (300 are closing every month) as cash usage collapses, and because they don’t want the bill for managing the last one left. His solution: the post office. It can be the core location for banking services in villages and towns vacated by the banks, and provide a guaranteed way for people to obtain cash wherever they are. But before we get there, can the Post Office find a way of making its stores and branches places someone might actually want to visit?
p.collinson@theguardian.com
