Lancashire Telegraph heralded over Post Office campaign

11:35am Wednesday 5th March 2008

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AN MP brandished a copy of the Lancashire Telegraph in Parliament during a debate on the closure of Lancashire's Post Offices.

Pendle MP Gordon Prentice said that the newspaper recognised that the disappearance of smaller branches would damage the fabric of rural life - even if the Post Office did not.

Mr Prentice highlighted the Save Our Post Offices campaign during a debate started by Lindsay Hoyle, MP for Chorley.

Mr Hoyle called on the government to dispell its notion that Lancashire is like 'Coronation Street' and consider its rural residents when closing post offices.

And he told other ministers that the county was not just urban and full of 'cobbled streets' and that many people in less built up areas would suffer if smaller, more local, branches were to disappear.

He said: "If we follow the programme of closures, the most vulnerable will find it most difficult of all to access a post office.

"It is important that this debate takes place. We are not saying, "Let's save everything", because that would be naive. We are trying to make a constructive case where there is room for manoeuvre and for decisions to be changed."

A six-week public consultation into the proposed closure of 24 post offices in East Lancashire, which bosses hope will reduce the £4million-a-week it is losing, ended on Monday.

National proposals include the closure of 2,500 post offices. Lancashire has had more than a quarter of its post offices closed since 2003 and East Lancashire is now set to lose another 24 branches.

Mr Prentice produced copies of some of the Lancashire Telegraph's Save Our Post Offices campaign stories. He referred to a story where a resident said his 20-minute trip to the post office in Carr Hall, Barrowford, would become a 1 hour and 37 minutes if he had to go to an alternative branch; and to another where the postmistress in Higham said the 'community would die' if the office closed.

Mr Prentice said: "Like everyone else, I am dismayed by what is happening because the post office is part of the fabric of urban and rural life. When post offices close, it will virtually be impossible to recreate the network."

Hyndburn MP Greg Pope labelled it a 'disgrace' that the no one had come out to accept the Lancashire Telegraph's petition at the Post Office's headquarters in Barnsley when a reporter tried to give it to officials last week.

Mr Prentice replied: "That is appalling. It genuinely shocks me to hear that people who would have spent a long time getting names for the petition should have been sent away with a flea in their ear."