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Post Office workers announce new strike over plan to close 70 branches
The Post Office said franchising out 70 branches was essential to securing the future of the service. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
The Post Office said franchising out 70 branches was essential to securing the future of the service. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Post Office workers announce new strike over plan to close 70 branches

This article is more than 10 years old
Union members vote to walk out on 7 May as company presses ahead with move to franchise out 'crown' branches to retailers

Post Office workers on Tuesday announced plans for their fourth strike since Easter after the company confirmed plans to transfer 70 of its big high street and city centre branches to retailers.

The Communication Workers Union (CWU), said the plan to franchise out 70 of the Post Office's 370 "crown" branches would "rip the heart out" of the network.

Billy Hayes, general secretary of the CWU, said: "This is a seminal moment for the Post Office. Closure and franchising plans would decimate the remaining crown network, slashing it by over 20%."

The CWU's 4,000 crown post office members on Tuesday voted nine-to-one in favour of a full-day strike on 7 May, the day after the May bank holiday. Staff have already held three strikes against the franchising plan since Easter Saturday, including a half-day strike on Monday.

The Post Office, which is state-owned and receiving £1.3bn of taxpayer subsidy, said franchising out 70 of the crown branches was essential to securing the future of the service.

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Kevin Gilliland, the Post Office's sales director, said the crown network of the biggest post offices across the country is "losing £40m a year of public money" and "must change the way they operate to ensure long term viability".

The CWU claims up to 800 Post Office jobs will be affected and staff are likely to receive inferior pay, pension and working conditions if they are transferred to retailers' books.

The Post Office said it had offered crown network staff an "extremely fair" £3,400 staged payment in recompense. The payment is worth about one sixth of an average Post Office employee's annual salary.

The company said it was "extremely disappointed" at the union's "refusal to understand the need for the Post Office to undertake these critical modernisation plans to transform its crown network into a viable business that is not reliant on public money".

It said the pay offer was "extremely fair at a time when business is losing money and when there are pay freezes in place across parts of the Post Office and many other organisations".

The Post Office said there would be no compulsory redundancies, and staff would have the option of being transferred to the retailer taking over their post office or switching to a different branch.

The union said the plans were a government cost-cutting measure. "They want to reduce the amount of money provided for Post Office services and these cuts are leading to deeply unpopular proposals to close crown post offices and remove services from the high street," Hayes said. Crown post offices represent just 3% of the nationwide network of 11,800 branches, but are generally the largest offices and handle 20% of all transactions and 40% of financial services sales, a key growth area for the Post Office.

Six years ago 85 crown outlets were closed in the Post Office's last turnaround plan, 70 of them were moved into WH Smith stores.

The Post Office said it had already received 150 expressions of interest from retailers keen to run post offices services in their stores. Subject to a public consultation the crown branches will be transferred to the winning retailers before April 2015.

The Post Office was, along with Royal Mail, part of the General Post Office until it was abolished in 1969. The Post Office became independent of Royal Mail, which the government is planning to privatise, in April last year.

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