LAST September, you published a letter from me expressing grave disquiet that despite all its rhetoric to the contrary, the government had no serious intention of supporting post offices in our rural areas, under dire threat as a result of its policies.
I wrote then: ?Worse still, the post office card accounts that were meant to enable those without bank accounts to keep their business with their local post office are being actively or tacitly discouraged by the need to wade through a mound of paperwork ? around seven separate communications from the Department of Work and Pensions ? before they are able to get their benefits paid into them. In addition, would-be customers are grilled by officials as to why they are asking for a post office account when they could be opening a bank account!
Now we know the truth. A leaked internal circular to its staff from the Department of Work and Pensions, entitled ?Payment Modernisation Project? reads:
?We need to pay most of these customers (sic) into bank accounts, which costs 1p rather than into Post Office card accounts, which costs 30 times more. You should be aiming to get nine out of ten new claimants to use bank accounts with a small proportion paid through Post Office card accounts.?
Chris Pond, Pensions Minister, tells us that the circular was meant to apply to jobseekers only and not pensioners, although it makes no such distinction in its advice to staff and the daily evidence from local postmasters and postmistresses here in West Devon proves otherwise.
Nothing could more clearly illustrate this government?s total indifference to the interests of rural areas such as ours and the extraordinary cynicism we have come to expect from it in this, as in almost every other, aspect of its conduct of our affairs.
Geoffrey Cox Prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for West Devon and Torridge