Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

Following on from my noble friend I should like to make a further point. There is a view that post offices, particularly rural post offices, are somehow the acme of small retailing. We know that they exist and offer a service but this is very rarely at any inconvenience to the owners of the shops. In some parts of the country, if you go on a Tuesday afternoon you will find that they are closed because they work a half-day on a Tuesday. When my wife was collecting the child benefit for our boys on a Saturday because she worked all week, if she was not there by 12.15 she found that the shutters were closed and there was no money available. She did not need to obtain it exclusively from the post offices but a lot of working mum’s do. There is a new style of retailing—not necessarily 24-hours-a-day-opening—but some of these post offices have got away with retailing murder because of the sentimental affection that a number of their customers had for them. People were kept out of them because it did not suit the purposes of the postmasters and postmistresses to keep their shops open Sometimes, where they have mini-supermarkets and the kinds of things to which my noble friend referred—and all power to their elbow—they still shut the post office at 12 o’ clock on a Saturday although they keep the rest of the operation going. In my previous constituency, I talked to people who had very successful mini-supermarkets with post offices in them; it was the only way of keeping the post office going. I asked, ““Why don’t you open after 12 o’clock or keep the place open after six? This is a small commuting town and people require postal services after their work or after they have done other things at home””. They said, ““We never thought about it””. The fact that they had never thought about it was in large measure because the Post Office Counters organisation never really put any pressure on the shopkeepers. Some closures, not all, are due to property prices. People made more out of selling their shop to someone as a home in a very attractive rural village than they would have made out of running a business, regardless of how much government money was put through in transaction charges and so on. There are many reasons why post office services have contracted in rural areas, but one of them, to which we have given insufficient attention, has been the quality of the service provided for all but those who get out of bed and walk in at 9.30 in the morning. These people are in the minority. Many people would make use of the services if they were open into the evening, as many of the rural shops are at the moment. That is part of a greater concern that the National Consumer Council brings post office services into a proper way of operating. At the end of the day, post office services are a franchise operation, and the franchisor has given insufficient attention to the retail service needs of the broad spectrum of the community. There is a case to be made for the NCC to shake up the post office services once it looks into the matter. If there is a criticism to be made of Postwatch, it is that it has been too narrowly focused, even though Peter Carr, its previous chairman, was a very distinguished retailer and had a very business-minded approach to the whole area. Insufficient consideration was given to putting post office services in the context of small-scale community retailing across the board of the kind that is surviving in very difficult circumstances in several areas because outlets are open when people want them to be open and provide the services that people need, not necessarily 24/7 but rather longer than from 9 to 5 and perhaps only from 9 to 12 on a Tuesday and a Saturday, as several post offices quite often are. If you stay open for longer, by and large you do more business. That is one rule of retailing that seems to have escaped the attention of several people in the post office lobby.