Watch out for flying pigs
No mention of pensions and ownership
Postal Services
Households and businesses in Britain should have access to reliable and high quality postal services underpinned by a strong universal service. Our vision is of a Royal Mail with a secure future, in good health and providing customers with an excellent service and its employees with rewarding employment.
Labour will protect the universal service. The British people rightly cherish the principle of letters collected and delivered anywhere in the UK, six days a week, for a single, affordable price.
A level playing field for Royal Mail is our commitment. We will give Ofcom the power to regulate the postal service, writing into law that it must give precedence to maintaining the universal service. We will also give Ofcom the powers to ensure that the market is fair.
We recognise the contribution that Post Offices make to the life of many communities, but also understand that the network needs to adapt as people’s lifestyles change. So we will support the Post Office network ensuring it has a viable future.
To help create a network that is more viable for the future, the Post Office has undertaken a significant rationalisation of its size. This has involved tough and difficult decisions. For the future the network needs to continue to develop. We want the Post Office to do more, to build on the existing services it provides and bring banking services back to the heart of people’s communities.
The Post Office already offers a wide range of financial services and we want to see it fully realising its potential in this area, supporting both financial and social inclusion. At the moment the Post Office is a relatively small but successful financial services provider and we want to expand this. Labour wants to see a major expansion in the reach and range of the Post Office in financial services. We will consider a number of new areas where we think the Post Office can make a difference – in particular, the Post Office Current Account, a Children’s Savings Account, Business Accounts, more mortgages, and the introduction of a weekly budgeting account so that those on low incomes can take advantage of direct debit accounts.
Key Achievements
* Government is providing up to £1.7 billion of funding to the Post Office, including £150 million a year to help support a network of around 11,500 branches to 2011. We have made it clear that a Labour Government will continue to support the Post Office beyond this date.
* With around 11,500 branches nationwide, the Post Office is the largest retail and financial services chain in the UK. Its network is larger than all of the UK banks combined.
* Over 99 per cent of the UK population lives within three miles of a Post Office branch and over 23 million customers visit each week.
* In 2004, the Post Office linked up with the Bank of Ireland in a joint venture to offer a wider range of financial services including savings, insurance and lending. This joint venture, Post Office Financial Services, now has more than two million customers, making it one of the fastest growing financial services providers in the UK.
* Products already offered through the joint venture include savings, insurance (car, motor, home, van, pet and motorcycle), credit cards, personal loans, life insurance, over-50s life cover and income protection (Lifestyle Protection).
* There are currently around £8 billion of savings invested with Post Office. There are 780,000 Post Office insurance policies in force. There are 600,000 Post Office credit cards issued and 3,700 new cards are issued each week.
* The Post Office is the UK’s largest provider of foreign currency and transacts £2.9 billion worth of foreign exchange each year. It currently has 28 per cent of the market. It is also the largest independent provider of travel insurance products in the UK, providing more than one million policies each year.
* The Post Office offers free access to cash and has almost 1900 fee-free ATMs. 58 million withdrawals totaling £2.32 billion were transacted through the Post Office ATM network in the last financial year.
* Post Office provides current account customers of 11 UK banks (13 brands) access to their cash free at branches - more than 60 per cent of total UK debit cardholders or around 25 million accounts.