‘Emergency meeting’ held over Downham Market’s Post Office

The future of Downham’s Post Office was the topic of an emergency meeting called by South West Norfolk MP Elizabeth Truss last week.

The town’s Post Office, housed within WHSmith on High Street, closed suddenly on July 12.

Since then, residents have had to travel to other Post Office outlets, some crossing the county border, to access services.

Councillors and a representative from the Post Office also attended the meeting, held at the Downham Market Town Council offices on Friday.

Ms Truss said: “It really isn’t acceptable for the Post Office to be closed for this amount of time with no alternative solution.”

The meeting heard that elderly residents had reported not being able to pay their bills as they were unable to get to another Post Office to withdraw their pension.

Frank Daymond said he had been told some residents had received “threatening letters” as they could not pay their bills.

Ken Penton, external affairs manager at the Post Office, said: “I just want to apologise on behalf of the Post Office. We don’t take action like this very lightly.”

Mr Penton added: “The Post Office closed in early July, we are going through a process to resolve that.

“For operational reasons I can’t comment any more on that but what would normally happen is that we speak to the post master and run a temporary Post Office from the same location, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to agree on that with the post master, it just was not viable.

“This is incredibly unusual.”

He said it was also not possible to run the services from a van, as there are none in the area that have the “capacity”.

Ms Truss said she had not received a reply from the Post Office chief executive on the matter.

“This is a very serious issue, this is a sizeable town which hasn’t had a service in the last couple of months. I would have thought the chief executive would be bothered about that,” she added.

Councillors suggested the Post Office put on transport between Downham and other Post Offices, and awarded compensation to those who paid out for transport.

Becky Hayes said: “If you don’t have a mobile van, what’s stopping you putting on transport a couple of times a day?

“If you can’t bring the Post Office to the people, why can’t you bring them to the Post Office?”

The meeting heard that residents were paying upwards of £9 for taxis to Post Offices in nearby villages.

While Mr Penton said he did not have answers to these suggestions immediately, he hoped to be able to share further updates later this week.

Ms Truss said: “We are a bit disappointed this hasn’t been taken more seriously.

“No one has given any sense of how long the process will take.”

Ms Truss backed the call for the Post Office to look at compensation for those who have suffered financially.