Less Service for More Subsidy - Bedford Street Post Office

The queues in this post office make those on the Tokyo subway - where ushers physically cram people onto the trains like sardines into a can - look like a picture of tranquility. Why?

The moronic Post Office Counters management have closed down all of the smaller, sub-post offices around Exeter so that everyone now has to go to Bedford Street. This creates more bus and car journeys into the city centre, more congestion, more pollution and more resentment. It's bad for the smaller shops, cafes and businesses around St Thomas, Mount Radford, Alphington and other outlying areas but presumably quite good for those in the city centre. However, it means more buses driving along the High Street, more profits for Stagecoach (despite their million pound subsidy from the taxpayer, via Devon County Council) and, overall, a piss-take on the taxpayer. Less service for more subsidy.

'It's unusually quiet here today.'

I spoke to the (very pretty, dark-haired) young woman on the counter on Saturday afternoon when, miraculously, there were virtually no people in Bedford Street Post Office. Before noon it is a very different story.

'It's because it's the middle of the month; it's busy at the end of the month when people renew their car tax, tv licences.' Now I know why.

I renewed my car tax the other week, in the middle of August, and was told that the new tax starts at the beginning of August. I lost out on two weeks of car tax. In this age of information technology, it is utterly appalling. It is a rip-off, just the same with the TV licence. The system is antiquated and requires people to descend on the post office at the exact same time, the end of the month (preferably the last day of the month).

Why not issue TV and car tax licences that run from the day you buy them regardless of what day of the month it is? That would stop the queue bottlenecks. Why not do Internet licensing where you buy over the Internet and the disc or licence is customised for you and then sent by post? They need to get their act together.

I feel sorry for the staff. They are led by the most slimey, toadying unions imaginable, the sort that won't stand up for their own members. The staff at the post office have been treated abysmally; they are made to work slave conditions, endless queues, no reasonable breaks and just churning out massive counter 'hits' hour after hour.

And what happens when the current post office is demolished and the Post Office is shrunk into a tiny shop in a portion of the old Tesco in Sidwell Street? Then it really will be sardines into a tin. It all shows what Britain has come to. Tony Blair, you are scum.

Ben Bradshaw, the local MP, pretends that he understands the problem and even campaigns against some closures, yet he is in the government, the company Post Office counters is still owned by the government - some sort of subsidiary of the awful Royal Mail, the former Consignia or whatever £5 million waste-of-money-name it was given - and if he was really bothered he would make a real issue of it with his cronies in London. But, he's simply playing it both ways.