Friday 4 April 2008

Steve's campaign for a mobile post office for Woodnesborough

I get a fair few political press releases, Thanet Life used to publish some and I thought perhaps I should publish the ones I get so here we go first one from Steve Ladyman.

Following the news that the Woodnesborough Post Office is to close, South Thanet MP Steve Ladyman is campaigning for Woodnesborough to be served by a Mobile Post Office.

Steve said,
"I'm very disappointed that Woodnesborough is closing as that closure will mean real hardship for some people, especially older people, in the village. Perhaps it was inevitable since the Post Mistress was keen to let the office go and you have to respect her desire to move on with her life even if it will be a sad day for the village when the Office closes."
'However, I intend to write to the Post Office to see if there is any possibility of a peripatetic service attending the village. If there was a visiting mobile service every week that would certainly allow older people and people with difficulty using public transport to get their pension."
This news follows Steves welcoming the decision by the Post Office not to close Cliffsend Post Office.
"The decision means that a much needed village resource has been saved and the village hall has a chance to prosper. I am grateful to everyone who responded to my survey and helped me give the Post Office the constructive feedback they needed to arrive at this decision. As I said at the time, crude petitions make little or no difference in this process but the detailed responses I was able to feed to the Post Office thanks to the efforts of everyone who responded to me have won the day."
On the other hand, Dr.Ladyman professed himself disappointed that two Ramsgate Post Offices are still to close.
"We gave the Post Office good feedback about the two Ramsgate offices but in the end I think the Post Office have decided there were good enough alternatives at St Lawrence and in the Town Centre. It's a disappointment."
The Government has put a great deal of money into the Post Office and no other political party has even said they would match it. The Liberal Democrats say they would privatise Royal Mail to pay to keep some branches open and the Tories have done no more than shed crocodile tears over closing branches without offering one penny more to save them. Thanks to the Government the remaining branches will provide a wide ranging and sustainable service into the future. Cliffsend and the many other branches currently operating in South Thanet will be part of that service; it's a great shame that these two Ramsgate branches and Woodnesborough will not be."

2 comments:

  1. The St Lawrence Post Office is our local (even prior to recent closures).

    Recently the queues have been out of the door and you can expect to wait 20-30 minutes before getting to the counter. I go on various days of the week and different times of day.

    I can only put this down to either:

    1.a huge proliferation in people selling stuff via ebay (and need to weigh every parcel) - there do seem to be quite a few of these people.

    2. the closure of other post offices mean that those customers now have to go somewhere else - that somewhere being St. L. There are only 2 windows there, so extra staff is simply not an option.

    The huge queues in post offices must be having an impact on businesses, like ours, which is now losing woman hours in order to stand in line.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I thought he voted with the Government on the need for closures, or am I wrong?

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.