The rubber stamp

8:31am Friday 16th May 2008

IKNOW it does lots of other things too, but I would imagine the Post Office classes communications as pretty much their core business.

That is why their failure to listen, learn and revise their closure programme is all the more reprehensible.

It isn't surprising though, and that is the sad part. Organisations that are remote, bureaucratic and insensitive to the needs of their customers - or are we stakeholders this week - are immune to petitions, protest meetings and other signs of public outrage. They have a bunker mentality and are happy with it.

As an elected mayor, I come into contact at one time or another with most government departments or agencies. Some have a really good attitude.

I know it might surprise some people, but I have found the immigration service to be particularly helpful and open. Others however, are living the bureaucrat's dream, or the citizen's nightmare.

None, I'm sorry to say, are worse than the Post Office.

I remember meeting a regional representative of Post Office Limited a while back to discuss the impact of an earlier round of closures.

He was friendly and affable. In fact, you might say you couldn't argue with him. That wasn't because he was right - I regarded his organisation's position as untenable and told him so. You couldn't argue as there was simply no point. The decision had been made by someone further up his food chain, located further away from the town and its realities. He was powerless, without any formal mechanism or informal influence to put things right. He could no more change matters than he could dismantle and reconstruct the Transporter Bridge.

And there, I suspect, is the real problem with the closure programme that will hit 37 post offices in our own area and 2,500 across the country. It bears all the hallmarks of a remote-control decision aimed at balancing the books, rather than creating a sustainable service. As this newspaper has pointed out, it will close viable businesses that provide essential services to people in remote communities, while allowing lame ducks to hobble until the next inevitable cull.

The problem is that, like a lot of organisations that have spent a fortune modernising, diversifying and running expensive and absurd advertising campaigns, the Post Office has forgotten what it is there for in the first place. Its fundamental role is to serve people and communities. Yes, it is a business and must be profitable, but sadly it hasn't learned the first rule of sustainable business - that you get the service right first before you start counting the money.

They have also failed to learn that businesses thrive by sharing knowledge and markets and cooperating with other organisations. The Local Government Association, the umbrella body for local councils, has been saying for months how it wants to explore ways in which threatened branches can be kept open - by using them as onestop shops or drop-in and advice centres.

These proposals will now form part of the much talked-about rescue package for many branches.

How much better it would have been if they had part of a long-term business plan in the first place, one that aimed to create attractive user-friendly outlets at the hub of their communities.

At the moment the government talks a lot about social capital. They mean the work put in by volunteers, community groups, churches and the like. It doesn't make a profit for shareholders, or register on the nation's balance sheet, but we all know we would be poorer without it.

What a pity then they didn't tell the Post Office that it needed to get a little of that social capital in one of its high-interest accounts. The failure to do so leaves them both open to the accusation that they know the price of everything but the value of nothing.