SAVING OUR POST OFFICE

The current Con Dem Westminster government’s plan to privatise the Post Office will affect every community in Wales, but, our rural and urban communities may end up suffering a reduction in services and postal deliveries. This unnecessary ideologically driven privatisation, may take place at a time when the Post Office has actuallymade a profit, could out postal services in rural areas such as Monmouth constituency at risk.

Privatisation of the Post Office - simply a bad idea...

A six day a week postal collection service is an important part of local life in rural and urban areas and the threat to that valuable service should be deeply worrying to most people. In my opinion it is simply not worth placing ourl postal delivery service in jeopardy merely to divert any profits into the hands of shareholders.

Many of our rural areas and valley communities already suffer from poor communications and slow, unreliable broadband access, something that hinders the development of rural businesses. The last thing that our small businesses need is to face another blow with threats to the postal service which are an important means of communication. This unnecessary privatisation could undermine, or worse abandon, the universal service obligation which is so valuable to so many people.

It is worth remembering that this desire to privatise the Post Office goes back to the last Labour Government which thought that part-privatisation was a good idea. The Lib Dems (now junior coalition partners) have locally (in Newport and no doubt elsewhere) previously been fast to leap to the defence of local post offices that were threatened with closure (even when they were not threatened with closure) are now helping to privatise the Post Office itself .

Plaid has rightly fought hard to defend Royal Mail in the House of Commons and continues to do so having recognised the huge importance of the universal service and has repeated its call for the Government to make concrete, long-term plans to protect it. Putting profit before the principle of good service will pretty much always undermine quality; hence the necessity of opposing the Con Dem Coalition Governments privatisation plans.