POST OFFICES: Who is responsible?

LIB Dem councillor David Potter seems to be confused about who is responsible for post office closures in Worthing and Adur or is it that he really wants to hijack the issue to make party political headlines and salvage himself from obscurity ahead of elections in his ward in May?
By The Newsroom
Published 26th Feb 2008, 13:20 BST
Updated 8th Jun 2018, 00:50 BST

Either way he clearly has not been following the whole sorry saga of the nine sub-post offices now confirmed for closure in Worthing and Adur.

Can we suggest that he refers to the Hansard record of the debate we initiated in Parliament on December 17 where we set out our case for retaining these vital local lifelines in some details?

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We do not recall Mr Potter contacting us to lend his support either before or after this debate.

We do not recall him contributing to the petition of 6,200 signatures which we collected from all the branches and directly from our constituents.

We do not recall him being present at any of the packed public meetings or marches we organised in Lancing, Sompting and Worthing.

Neither Post Office Ltd nor Postwatch recall him being at the meetings we held with them or having approached them separately to protest.

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We do not recall him working with us and residents on presenting detailed research to the Post Office about the effects on traffic, parking, carbon emissions, pensioner mobility and the like.

Throughout the whole sorry saga of the closures and sham consultation the Post Office assured us that this was a genuine exercise and the case put by our constituents would be listened to.

Clearly that commitment was worthless and the Post Office have bulldozed through their proposals regardless.

Notwithstanding this abuse of the democratic process we have approached Postwatch to call for an appeal and are making representations to the Minister responsible about the way the consultation was carried out.

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Yet again Mr Potter appears to be invisible when it comes to doing anything other than criticising MPs who are just doing the job they were elected to do on behalf of our constituents.

Ironically, in Adur the Labour Party has criticised the local MP - Tim '“for being too active in the post office closure issue and that the closures are justified because the network should make a profit regardless of the social hardship it will inevitably cause.

If Mr Potter is genuinely interested in standing up for local people then he should direct his fire at the real villains, namely the Labour Government, which has instructed the Post Office to close up to 2,500 branches and to hell with the consequences.

But then again we doubt that this is local residents, in May the local voters, can guess his real motivation.

We intend to work with all, for all, on this and other issues of importance.

Tim Loughton MP

Peter Bottomley MP

Related topics:Labour PartyMPsLabour