6,000 post offices face being sold off in 'secret plan' to axe half of network

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/6000-pos ... g-26508290

Campaigners believe bosses want to offload up to 6,000 loss-making branches – over half the network – and turn the Post Office into a John Lewis-style 'mutual' company run by staff

Thousands of post offices face being sold or axed under secret plans to streamline the scandal-hit business, it is claimed.

Campaigners believe bosses want to offload up to 6,000 loss-making branches – over half the network – and turn the Post Office into a John Lewis -style “mutual” company run by staff.

The shock move would help draw a line under the IT fiasco that saw thousands of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of stealing from their branches.

It has left the taxpayer with a bill of up to £1billion in compensation and legal fees and the Post Office looking for new ways to secure its future.

Ex-postmistress Sally Stringer, giving evidence at the public inquiry into the scandal, said she was left stunned when officials discussed scaling down the state-owned network.

During mediation talks with other workers, one executive told them: “Well, of course, we will only have 5,000 offices when we mutualise.”

She said: “I looked at her and said, ‘Really? You’ve got 11,000 offices now, so you’re going to reduce by 6,000 offices…’”

Ms Stringer, who ran a post office in Beckford, Gloucs, for 20 years, told the inquiry such closures would be “fundamentally and utterly wrong”.

Plans to mutualise the PO were proposed nearly a decade ago but the idea was dropped.

Mark Baker, of the Communication Workers Union, thinks the PO wants to give postmasters a share in its ownership. But he says this would only work if it ditched unprofitable branches and the Government ran them like a local library service.

He said: “You wouldn’t get much resistance from post-masters if full compensation was paid. But customers would be very upset.”

The Government has said it is committed to maintaining the 11,500-branch network at its current level across the UK.

The Post Office said: “Our network of 11,500 branches has been stable for the last decade and we’ve seen a net growth in our network of 181 branches between the end of March 2021 and December 2021 alone.”