Save Bolsover Post Offices

'Save our Post Office' window posters are going up in many houses. Following a wave of post office closures two years ago, 180 closures are planned as the first batch of the latest wave of 2,500 branches to be axed across the country.

Jon Dale, Bolsover

If Post Office Ltd bosses get away with this, they will be back for another round in a year or two. The whole network of local post offices is threatened.

Hardest hit will be elderly and disabled people, having to travel by infrequent buses if they can, pay for a taxi or pay to get their money from a cash machine in a shop or pub. Highly paid post office bosses who make these decisions won't be queuing for their salaries!

Apparently the post office network is losing Ł4 million a week and fewer customers are using the post offices. So why did the Labour government stop pensions and benefits being paid with a book, forcing people to open bank accounts? And now we can't pay water rates, buy TV licenses or pay some gas bills at the post office.

The bosses are deliberately making post offices unviable. Who will benefit? The banks – eyeing up all the extra profits they can make, and the supermarkets - taking services into their stores to draw more customers in.

In North Derbyshire the fight to save our post offices is on! 60 angry Carr Vale residents attended an emergency Community Association meeting, called at just three days notice.

A meeting in Hodthorpe has been organised. Post office queues are being leafleted for a rally outside the one office planned to stay open (for the time being) in Bolsover.

We will show what the queues would be like if the four surrounding offices close.

Protest has to be built across the area. The more we can join local campaigns together the stronger we will be, and the harder for the post office bosses (and behind them the government) to ignore us.

We need action to show we will not give up these vital local services without a fight.

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