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Post office a lifeline
• AS a local councillor I am shocked to hear that the Post Office is prepared to contemplate closing Essex Road branch, which is in my ward.
The consultation document acknowledges the important “social and economic” role played by a local post office.
This office provides not only a lifeline for many residents who are either disabled, old or have young families, but it also has an important secondary economic function, in that many customers who withdraw cash there then spend some of that money in the adjoining shops – the butcher, the supermarket, the newsagents and others.
If the post office is to close, these important shops will lose business, and in turn be forced to close, causing permanent damage to local amenity and social cohesion.
I am also concerned by the argument that the need to close the post office is driven by cost, and the statement that post offices generally are losing money.
I would ask the Post Office:
• What level of losses is this post office returning?
• Has the level of loss increased significantly since the sale of the freehold by Islington Council to a developer in the summer of last year?
I am convinced that the decision whether or not to close this post office should not be taken on purely economic grounds.
It should not be closed at all, but if the Post Office is determined to go ahead with the closure, it should be made a condition that a post office franchise has been agreed, and is open and operating in other retail premises in the immediate vicinity before this office is allowed to close.
Cllr Martin Klute
Labour, St Peter’s ward
• READERS will have seen MP Emily Thornberry in the Tribune pages railing against the closure of Essex Road post office. But only last year, Ms Thornberry voted in Parliament in favour of the government’s post office closure plans.
It was as a direct result of this vote that we have already lost post offices all over the borough, and are now at risk of losing even more.
Cllr George Allan
Lib Dem, Clerkenwell
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