Newspaper Column – The Cornishman – 27/10/25

 

• While Post Office top executives have enriched themselves and protected a top-heavy central office they’ve been quietly “strangling” post office branches with poverty wages and closing ranks during the horizon accounting scandal.

  I met new Post Offices Minister, Blair MacDougall MP, in the Commons this week to make the case for reopening local branches, beginning with Newlyn and Porthleven.

  A dozen post office branches closed during my 9-year absence from the Commons. Meanwhile the top exec received more than £430k + perks and more than a hundred staff on £100k+. Collectively they not only sought to deny sub postmistresses/masters justice under the Horizon scandal, but created a remuneration system which they knew would be unsustainable, and cause widespread closures.

  I was joined by a local sub-postmaster with years of experience and inside knowledge. S/he confirmed it was now almost impossible under the modern sub post office franchise to secure even a minimum wage income, let alone cover all other costs (rent, employment on-costs, rates, utility costs, etc).

  The Minister and I were told a sub post office would need to sell an average of at least 450 stamps an hour just to bring income to minimum wage (£15-16k p.a) over the full (50) operational hours. Managers expect sub post offices to operate on love rather than money. The Minister agreed to investigate and to help me get these offices reopened. He was receptive and promised to look closely at the way the Post Office is run, even though Ministers are prevented from meddling in its internal operation. 

 

• Meanwhile, local MPs are being schmoozed by the “Great South West” (GSW); a group you won’t have heard of, because they’re a largely self-appointed caucus set up under the last government, backed with public funds, with the intention of quietly manufacturing a ‘region’ of top decision-makers to whom Cornwall would end up becoming subservient. They’ve asked me to add my name to another letter to Ministers, seeking an “urgent commitment from Government to back…the Great South West Partnership…for a bold and ambitious agenda for growth across the region”. I refused. 

 

I’m deeply troubled by this. It’s a marketing initiative. So, of course it’s impressively slick and professional. But it remains an unhelpful distraction from the work we need to get on with in Cornwall, not least that it may only confuse government ministers and officials with mixed messages, as well as potentially granting false hope to those who still hanker after tidy, obedient government zones designed for administrative convenience of Whitehall and to submerge communities of interest and territories which do exist, like Cornwall.  

 

The GSW seems to me a zombie marketing vehicle; a left over from the past government, now desperately looking for a purpose beyond the point where it’s been shown (as it now is) to be irrelevant. I’d prefer Cornwall’s excellent Growth Partnership to get on with its own approach to government.