MP blasts The Post Office

I felt it necessary to blast the Post Office after receiving notification that yet another post office in the Benson area has closed. RAF Benson post office closed for an unspecified but allegedly temporary period from 21 July. The notice to me was not posted until 2 August some two weeks later. This closure comes close on the heels of the announcement that the post office in Benson village will close later this summer.

Local residents and I had been hoping that the village would be able to put together a community solution to the Benson village post office replacement. But the Post Office has told local residents it is no longer in favour of community solutions and does not even much like an 'outreach' solution where services could be provided from a nearby post office in another village.

In a letter to the Post office, I have complained that the late notification of the closure of the post office at RAF Benson gives no useful information. It does not tell residents what the ‘operational' reasons are for the closure, what the Post Office is doing to restore the facility or when it is likely to be restored.

The closure notice invites local residents to ‘continue to use the Post Office' adding that they are ‘free to visit the service most convenient for them'. This is utterly disingenuous since it fails to mention that the service most convenient for them would have been in Benson village if it it too was not to be closed.

The Post Office's dog in the manger approach to a community post office is completely unacceptable in a situation in which a village of some 5,000 people plus a large and expanding RAF base are left without a post office. It is all the more unacceptable when the reason local residents now have to travel as far as Wallingford for a service is because the Post Office itself closed down a perfectly viable and profitable service in Crowmarsh under the botched rationalisation programme back in 2008.

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