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Don't pin the blame on the EU
THE 'blame everything on Brussels brigade' would have us believe that post office closures have all been caused by the EU's insistence on competition. Perhaps a few facts are in order?
The postal market in the UK was liberalised in the early 1990s by the then Conservative government. The recent EU regulations on the liberalisation of the postal sector therefore has no effect on the UK postal services whatsoever except to put others across Europe on a level footing with the UK.
Rather than undermining the public service requirement, the EU postal services directive requires that services (be they Royal Mail, La Poste or Deutsch Post etc) must guarantee at least one delivery and collection five days a week for every citizen in an EU country and to maintain a sufficient number of post offices in rural or sparsely populated areas.
Whether rural and other post offices deserve a public subsidy is a national decision. The EU has never ordered the UK to stop subsidies and, indeed, Government subsidy to post offices amounts to around 150m per year to sustain 11,500 post offices.
The reality is that this is a debate about economics and the viability of sub-post offices, in an era when much that was previously sent by post is now sent by fax or email, benefits are paid directly to people's bank accounts rather than having to queue at post offices and costs are rising.
Even with the public subsidy, which is justified by the social and community arguments for sub-offices, many of them are simply no longer viable. There is self-evidently a limit to the amount of taxpayers' money that can be ploughed into keeping them alive and some very tough choices had to be made by the post office. In some cases, these choices can be legitimately challenged. But for the anti-EU brigade to try and divert these challenges into support for their own political agenda of criticising the EU, simply diverts such campaigns into an irrelevant dead-end.
James Wagstaff, City Walk, Leeds
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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