Crichton Avenue post office closes amid row between bosses and branch manager

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A POST Office manager has closed her shop after the stress brought on by a payment system beset by problems became too much.

Wendy Martin, a postmistress at the Crichton Avenue branch, in York, first told The Press about the complications surrounding the Horizon system in August 2015.

She revealed how faults in the system’s connection were stopping payments from going through and she would have to cover the shortfall -often hundreds of pounds - with her own money.

Mrs Martin temporarily closed the shop and demanded the Post Office fix the system, then re-opened when the situation seemed to be returning to normal.


However, the issue was never fully sorted and Mrs Martin became ill with stress.

Mark Baker, national branch secretary for post masters at the Communication Workers Union, spoke on Mrs Martin’s behalf.

He said: “Wendy took on managing the Post Office in good faith, but the income was no where near what the Post Office advised it could be.

“The problem never fully settled down and Wendy called on the Post Office for help because it had reached the point where this was going to cost her in terms of her health and money.

“It was basically driving her crazy.

“She has done this with huge regret. The public has had to deal with this as well, but it’s sad the community is going to lose this facility.


“They have to point the finger of blame at the Post Office because they could have stepped in and helped her.”

The claims were consistent with around 100 sub-postmasters who said they were wrongly prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting because of cash shortfalls arising from the same computer software.

A spokeswoman for the Post Office said: “We apologise to customers that the postmistress has chosen to close temporarily the Post Office in Crichton Avenue.

“There is currently a contractual dispute between the Post Office and the subpostmistress who operates the Crichton Avenue branch and we are making every effort to resolve this.


“We do not discuss individual cases of dispute. Horizon has around 78,000 users, processes six million transactions a day and the Post Office is confident in the robustness of the system.”

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The Post Office Board ?