Danczuk welcomes post office rescue plan

Date published: 09/07/2008

Rochdale’s Labour Parliamentary Candidate, Simon Danczuk, has welcomed the news that Rochdale Council is stepping in to save a number of post offices earmarked for closure across the Borough.

He said he was delighted that the Council had followed Labour’s suggestion to introduce a rescue plan at the earliest opportunity and praised officers for offering a £20,000 subsidy to individual branches to keep five post offices in the Borough open.

“Rochdale Council’s Chief Executive, Roger Ellis, has done an excellent job in coming up with a local solution to a national problem,” he said. “I welcome these proposals. What the Council now needs to do is to ensure it gets value for money from the Rochdale council tax payers’ subsidy by ensuring these Post Offices deliver services on behalf of the Council. Post Offices can be a real community hub and everything must be done to ensure this is the case, so that they’re a one-stop-shop for a wider variety of services – they must earn their subsidy.”

He added that the Labour Group had been calling for the Council to have a strong contingency plan in place for some time now and he was pleased that hard solutions were now being put on the table.

“We have to look at what is realistically achievable here,” he said: “Protests cannot solve everything and we simply had to consider alternative options to give these post offices a chance of staying open. This was always a viable option when you consider that Rochdale Council got the best settlement in Greater Manchester from our Government earlier this year, receiving an extra £5.9m, an increase of 5.4 per cent. I’m pleased the Council have done the right thing.”