Mr & Mrs Brownley who run the community based post office in Marshside Road, Churchtown are under constant threat of closure. They will hear their fate in June 2004. Mrs Brownley said; small post offices can not compete with large supermarkets because they sell amongst other things postage stamps and stationary at discount prices.



They are so concerned about closure that her husband is training for another career in the event of their post office getting the axe.

One local resident has just received a letter from the Disability department saying that they will be discontinuing post office order books and intend to pay benefits directly into personal accounts.

The department seem to be encouraging payments into a bank account, but they also indicated that claimants could open up a post office account for their benefits to be paid into. However, the resident noticed how laborious they have made the whole process of opening a post office account. Pictured below is Mrs Brownley.



The resident spoke to Mrs Brownley about how tedious the whole procedure is to open the post office accounts, and it seemed like they are trying to encourage people not to bother with them, and just have the benefit paid into their bank accounts instead.

Mrs Brownley said;

a) That many people do still want to be able to collect their benefit or pension from the PO, and they’ve taken the trouble to fill these forms. However, the forms seem to have been designed in a way that causes many people to fill them incorrectly, and the government department responsible for processing these forms just rejects them if there are any mistakes at all, thereby making it an even more long, drawn-out process.

b) The fact that people are insisting that they are still able to collect their benefit/pension as opposed to having it paid into a bank has proved to be “the saviour of small post offices”.

This seems to me that this is a case of people power. They want to close these community PO’s but the people who use them are making a stand.

I just wonder though how many people are actually aware of the situation, and how many would be willing to take steps to stop them by supporting their local post office (making the effort to purchase stamps from their local shop instead of the supermarket) if they were fully aware of the situation?

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