Post Office admit consultation failure in response to Beith

10.45.00am GMT Tue 25th Nov 2008

Alan Beith MP and Cllr Dougie Watkin have not given up the fight for our local post offices.

In a letter to Sir Alan Beith MP, Post Office Limited have admitted that mistakes were made during the consultation exercise on the future of post offices in the Berwick-upon-Tweed constituency.

Alan Beith challenged Post Office managers over their handling of the consultation when the Decision Booklet failed to mention submissions on North Charlton and North Sunderland, when the MP had made specific comments relating to those branches. A Freedom of Information request by a Norham resident also failed to produce submissions which were known to have been sent in.

The programme Director for Network Change, Sue Huggins, writes

"It appears that, unfortunately, your consultation response was incorrectly filed following receipt by the consultation team and, accordingly, was not in the pack of information given to the decision maker. This was due to a staff error and I apologise unreservedly that this occurred."

Ms Huggins goes on to say that a full review of the consultation has now taken place.

Alan Beith said

"When Post Office Limited announced their decisions for our area I was extremely sceptical that all the material submitted to them could have been collated, read and assessed in the very short space of time between the end of the consultation and the decision being announced. We now know that at least one submission - mine - was "misfiled" and I have asked for sight of all submissions relating to all post office branches in the Berwick constituency, and for Belsay Post Office, under the Freedom of Information Act. I will compare the submissions held by Post Office Limited with the copies which people were kind enough to send to me, to see if there are any others which may have been misfiled.

"Post Office Limited have not supplied me with the documents I have asked for during the time scale specified by the Freedom of Information Act and I will be taking this failure up with the Information Commissioner. The failure to supply straightforward documents within 20 working days further undermines any shred of confidence left in the handling of this consultation process by Post Office Limited.

"Post Office Limited have told me there was a full review of the decisions for our area but that this was carried out by Adrian Wales who had already made his mind up once on what we should have.

"The handling of this process has been simply appalling and I have asked the Secretary of State to intervene and put all proposals for our area on hold until the competency of Post Office Limited to carry out its own decision making on the future of the network can be reviewed.

"I will continue to fight for our post offices which provide such a vital service in our rural communities."