Tory rumours and Post office consultations - both a sham!

Written by David Heath MP and published in Western Gazette on Thu 5th Jun 2008

I've now had three journalists ring me up over the last week or so asking me if it is true that I intend to step down at the next election. One even suggested that he had heard that I was about to go to the House of Lords, and I was probably being fitted for my ermine right now! When I asked who had been telling them this obvious untruth, one admitted that he had heard it from local Conservatives. Curiously enough, exactly the same thing happened about four years ago, at the same time before the last general election.

So, let's get things straight. No, I don't intend to step down when the election comes, next year or in 2010. As long as I am still fit and able, and while I still feel it a privilege and a thrill, as I do, to have the opportunity to represent Somerset people in parliament, I will contend the Somerton & Frome constituency again, and if people on the whole like what I am doing, I hope they will support me. If ever I feel I am not able to do the job as well as I believe it should be done, or I feel it's time for the well-being of myself or my family to step down and let somebody else do it, then I shall make a very clear announcement to that effect. I'm not quite sure what the benefit might be to spreading a rumour about my imminent retirement when it's not true, but perhaps it is just wishful thinking!

Dealing with rather more substantive matters, I was saddened but, I'm afraid, not remotely surprised that the Post Office have confirmed the closure of post offices across the length and breadth of Somerset, including seven in my constituency closed outright and another two reduced to a visiting post-van. It was clear from the moment that the government announced the closure of two thousand five hundred further post offices and the local post office management fingered the ones they wished to close in Somerset that even the best of campaigns was unlikely to change their minds.

Was the consultation a sham? I'm afraid to say that in large measure it was, because I see no evidence that the arguments so forcefully put by local people and elected representatives at all levels were properly considered. In any case, it was clear that saving one post office could only be at the expense of another, equally valued by its own community.

Were we wrong therefore to campaign so strenuously against closure? No, I don't think we were, because it is simply not acceptable for these decisions to be taken without the local community having their say, even if it is subsequently, and disastrously, ignored. Why should we go down without a fight?

And I some cases the arguments were very well marshalled. In Kingsdon, near Somerton, for instance, where the village were united in trying to save what they correctly identified as an essential part of their village life. Or Bower Hinton, where local residents face a much harder daily walk down to Martock to use an excellent but very busy post office when they had their own, valued post office on the doorstep. Or in North Cadbury or Charlton Horethorne, which will now have a replacement van service, but for how long beyond the three year minimum?

I applaud the efforts of local people to make the case for their local post offices, and I think that, perversely, the fuss we have been making on this issue over several years meant that the local closure programme was perhaps rather curtailed from what we at one point feared. But the fact remains that bad decisions have been taken. And I'm very sad to say that Postwatch, the consumer body charged with protecting services, felt unable to say anything at all, despite my urgent requests, about any of the rural post office closures in Somerset, simply saying in a letter to me that the closures were government policy and therefore had to go ahead. I don't think that's good enough.

What is sad about all this is that nobody seems to be listening to local voices about what they value, and I think that is more and more a feature of modern society, which is becoming increasingly faceless. As decisions are taken by unelected bodies, remote from local areas, when often it is not possible to ring up anybody to whom you can attach a name or a position, indeed often you hear a recorded message or at best a call-centre in Bangalore, when there are no local branches of banks, or post offices, or government offices, a level of humanity is being lost from our relationships with authority.

That is bad enough, but when the result is some of the Kafka-esque nightmares of people trying to get simple answers and failing that I so often see in casework, or when decisions are taken which profoundly affect local communities without any local voice being heard, then I think we are in danger of alienating folk and creating a dangerously anonymous and unfriendly society.

We should be very wary of this trend. It isn't just the frustration of dealing with organisations with which it is impossible to have a sensible conversation, let alone persuading them of the merits of one's position. It is the real sense that if government, administration and commerce are things done to us rather than a contract into which we enter, then we as individuals have no stake in the outcome. A faceless society is an uncaring society, and an uncaring society is not something that most of us would choose to live in.