No welcome in the valleys

Post office closures are hitting disabled people in Wales particularly hard, says Rosaleen Moriarty Simmonds

Cashier Number Five please.” This pleasant yet automated voice is not some quirky creation for Doctor Who by Russell T Davies OBE – currently Cardiff’s most famous export – but the greeting from the post office at my local Asda, telling me of the next available cashier.

Don’t get me wrong: Cashier Number Five is a very nice woman but it is just not the same as the old-fashioned post office where my mother used to gossip with her friends and collect the family allowance.

The local post office of yesterday was not just a place for posting letters. You could buy sweets and a host of other things.

Remember those huge glass sweet jars towering at the back of the counter? You’d spend what seemed like hours in that Aladdin’s cave, deciding how to spend the 20p pocket money that your grandmother had given you.

For many, those days are just a memory, with MPs backing a decision to close up to 3,000 post offices across the UK.

In Wales, the impact on disabled people of these closures is great, as dozens of small post offices have already closed and more will follow.

In 2003, residents in the Willowtown area of Ebbw Vale made headlines with their fight to save their local post office. Sadly, it closed in May 2004 and four others in the town followed shortly afterwards. The only sweetener was a proposal to make the town’s main post office more accessible. All very well, but if you are disabled and don’t have access to your own transport, a taxi journey to cash your benefit cheque could cost as much as £4.

The Post Office recently announced that six post offices in rural Brecon and Radnorshire would close.

This continued closure programme will have a devastating effect on communities throughout Wales.

In Wales, high levels of rural living, chronic sickness and a disabled and ageing population make it essential to deliver services locally.

We need to recognise that in order to save our post offices, we have to use them and use all the services that they offer.

And so, while it was nice speaking with Cashier Number Five, next time I’ll visit Maresh, our local sub-post master, support our locality and remember that, for others, the simple pleasure of going to a post office has gone forever.