Post Office Management Culture

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Marion Fellows

Thursday 8th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Marion Fellows]

I really thank the Minister for his intervention because hearing direct from the Minister that he will not be pursued will provide my constituent with some element of comfort. However, people are still traumatised years later because of the treatment they have had and it is hard for them to believe that people will not pursue them. I will show my constituent a clip of what the Minister just said.

I have met recently with Christopher Head, who is in the Gallery today. He is a Horizon victim and campaigner who, out of his own good will, helps others in applying for compensation. I do not want anyone else to add to Christopher’s burden because he is doing such a good job. He has told me of the difficulties people face and that he himself received an offer that was only a minuscule fraction of his estimated Horizon losses. Alan Bates recently talked about his offer as well.

Many sub-postmasters I have spoken to recently told me that they plugged shortfalls out of their own pocket for years. The Minister has advised those people to apply for the Horizon shortfall scheme, and I sincerely hope that many more people will take advantage of that. Will the Minister ask Post Office management to make their records of those payments available to individuals? Have Post Office management let the Minister know when they will give an estimate of the excess claimed in Horizon shortfalls, from the introduction of the system to the end of financial year 2019-20? That is important because all that excess money, which was not owed, was put into Post Office Ltd and management bonuses were paid on profits.

The Post Office network is in disarray. Sub-postmasters have no faith in the current management of Post Office Ltd to turn things around. What they see is an organisation that is top-heavy, with multiple layers of management and directors, who have self-interest at heart.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. For obvious reasons, she has focused on the Horizon scandal, which has horrified the country, but the malaise within the Post Office management goes much further than that. Over the last 10 years, I have noticed the so-called temporary closure of many sub-offices that never reopen, and the loss of town centre post offices, some of which have been there for a century or more. Does she agree that the fundamental duty of the Post Office to run a viable network across the countries of the UK is simply not being fulfilled, and that lies at the door of Post Office management?

[Marion Fellows]

I could not agree with the hon. Gentleman more. I have lost three post offices in the last year, but not one vacancy has been filled. As we all know, it is the poorest and most vulnerable who regularly use post offices. I will be applying to the Backbench Business Committee for another debate on the continuation of the network. The network also includes pick-up and drop-off offices—PUDOs, in the vernacular—that are not real post offices. Those who work there are not under Post Office terms and conditions, as they work for Payzone, which Post Office Ltd owns. The post office network is in disarray and postmasters have absolutely no faith in the current management. All the while, as the hon. Gentleman says, the network is crumbling, post offices are closing, and sub-postmasters are being asked to take on additional work for less pay, being punished for reducing hours as they try to keep overheads down in the middle of an economic crisis, and seeing their life investment lose value with each subsequent scandal that is uncovered. Lack of sub-postmaster support continues to this day, in stark contrast to the postmaster support policies championed by POL in the briefing that it gave me for this debate.

I have heard evidence of a recently widowed postmaster, who was told by a senior manager that Post Office Ltd

“does not have a roadmap for bereavement”,

meaning that people were left alone without support, except from their fellow sub-postmasters. In the same briefing, Post Office Ltd outlined that it had increased fees for banking deposits by 20%. As Richard Trinder, chair of Voice of the Postmaster, put it:

“20% of not a lot, is still not a lot.”

Communities are losing a vital social asset, and the post offices that remain are being powered by the altruistic nature of hard-working sub-postmasters, pillars of the community, who are running out of energy. In 2012, the societal value of POL was estimated to be £2 billion. Does the Minister have an updated figure? I do not expect an answer on that today.

The Minister’s announcement that the Government will legislate to exonerate convicted sub-postmasters is welcome. Lord Arbuthnot said that

“a mass problem requires a mass solution.”

Will the Minister commit to changing the governance format, which clearly has not worked for decades? It is high time for the Government to adopt a new approach, as the current arm’s length governance arrangement has allowed scandal after scandal to fester under the watch of successive Labour, Conservative and coalition Governments. Essentially, sub-postmasters find themselves subsidising a Government-owned network at significant personal cost. Moreover, when issues arise, they are left to navigate the path to justice on their own. The pressing need for genuine support for those on the frontline is evident. Will the Minister elaborate on the Government’s plan for the post office network, excluding PUDO services?

Government oversight has not solved any of the issues of the past, including Horizon. It is the hard work and tireless campaigning of sub-postmasters themselves, journalists such as Nick Wallis, and campaigners such as Alan Bates and Christopher Head, the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance, Eleanor Shaikh, Dan Neidle, Tim McCormack, the CWU, Voice of the Postmaster, the National Federation of SubPostmasters, and many Members in this place past and present, that has continued to push the Government on the issue. Will the Minister, on record, please confirm that sub-postmaster organisations, such as Voice of the Postmaster and the CWU, will no longer be excluded from discussions with Post Office Ltd? It is essential that those who power the post office network are front and centre of any decision-making process that will carry the Post Office forward. For those who are not aware of this, the NFSP is financed by Post Office Ltd. I am making no judgment on how it performs in respect of its members, but we need a wider range of postmasters who will be consulted on and worked with if we are to change things going forward.

I have seen a rather large list of 23 directors in the senior leadership team at Post Office Ltd, not one of whom is a postmaster national executive director or a postmaster experience director, so when Nick Read speaks of putting

“postmasters right at the centre of the business”,

are the postmaster director roles simply window dressing?

Until postmasters have a say in all levels of the business, the culture will not change. Only recently, a communications director at POL, Richard Taylor, was suspended for saying that

“some of them were guilty.”

It says so much that he felt able to say that publicly.

As Bates v. Post Office Ltd has shown the nation, it was the hard-working community sub-postmasters who built the trusted reputation and social value of the Post Office over centuries, and it was those within management who pulled it down. If it is to be rebuilt, then the rebuild must be led by those community pillars once again.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the speech I had written was twice as long as this. I know that I have probably overrun my time, but I still have so much more to say. Change must happen. The fact that there will be a general election this year—that is without doubt—must not stand in the way of change that is so, so needed.

Post Office Network

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Marion Fellows

Thursday 25th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Marion Fellows]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I will come to the point he raises further into my speech.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am more cynical than my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore); I have had a temporary closure that has lasted four years and I have four temporary closures. The Post Office knows that permanent closures get a lot of opposition, so temporary closures and downgrading Crown post offices to the back of WHSmith is its way of undermining the network while muting public opposition. I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. She is obviously not fooled in that way.

[Marion Fellows]

I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman. I have a temporary postmaster still in office in Wishaw after the sub-post office there was temporarily closed last year.

What the public are seeing is yet another managed decline of a valued public asset driven by a Tory ideology of non-intervention. The public are, through their elected Government, the owners of Post Office Ltd. They feel and have let their elected Members know that the Government should be driving action to ensure the sustainability and promotion of the post office network. I hope the Minister will outline not only the actions her Department has taken, but the further actions she will take in response to the concerns of communities, postmasters and Members here today.

The main issue undermining the sustainability of the post office network is the postmaster crisis. At the root of that is sub-postmaster pay. Scottish National party MPs and Members from all parties have heard over and again from their local sub- postmasters about how poor pay is a leading cause of closures in their constituencies; I have even had sub-postmasters contact me from England to complain about the level of pay they are receiving.

The National Federation of SubPostmasters—the organisation that represents sub-postmasters across the UK—has said that two thirds of branch closures are due to sub-postmaster resignations, and they have attributed that to low pay. Sub-postmasters’ general conditions are also poor, with as many as one third taking no time off at all last year.

A survey released this month by the National Federation of SubPostmasters found that one in five towns could lose its post office in the next year. Of the 1,000 workers surveyed, 22% plan to hand in their keys, pass on their branch or downsize. The Post Office’s 2017-18 annual report states that sub-postmasters’ pay has fallen by £17 million in one year. That is a 4.4% cut. Sub-postmasters sustained a brutal £27 million cut the year before. Looking at postmasters’ pay in the long term, we see that it has declined by £107 million since 2012.

As part of Post Office Ltd’s North Star initiative to create a profit of £100 million by 2021, it used cuts to sub-postmasters’ pay to increase its profits from £13 million to £35 million in 2017-18. That is while the majority of sub-postmasters earn less than the minimum wage for running a vital public service in their communities.