Sir Roger Gale
Member of Parliament for Herne Bay and Sandwich (including West Thanet)
 

North Thanet`s MP Roger Gale has this (Tuesday) morning condemned the Post Office Closure programme as "an exercise based upon numbers that does not recognise the needs of real people" and said that the "consultation exercise" launched by the Post Office today is a charade designed to place a fig-leaf to cover the embarrassment of a plan drawn up by a failed government and a failed management.

Five post offices are being put forward for closure in North Thanet, with others in South Thanet and surrounding districts across Kent.  The five are: Central Herne Bay, Minnis Bay, Westbrook, Approach Road and Dane Road.

"To take two examples it cannot be right to close a post office in the heart of a Herne Bay that is poised for regeneration" says the MP "and to shut the post office in Minnis Bay would rip the heart out of a community that is elderly and separated fro the next nearest post office in Station Road Birchington by a railway line, a narrow and dangerous road and a steep hill.

It is the government that has set the guidelines for the Post Office to work by, it is the government that has stripped pension and TV license and Road Tax business away from sub post offices and it is Gordon Brown who, as Chancellor, designed the financial plan for the Post Office and must carry the can for the destruction of a first-class community service.

The Post Office is putting forward proposals for Mobile Post offices, home visits and the like but these will not assist the small retail businesses that are vital to local people and that have historically been founded upon and around post offices.

I am not resisting change for the sake of resistance but when a government and a company join forces to destroy a part of our heritage we have to resist.

I hope that communities up and down the County will scream blue murder and that customers will write individually and in thousands in response to the "consultation" so that Brown is made aware that his very future in politics is at stake if this plan goes ahead in its present form."

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