WHILE your petition is to be welcomed, I feel much more needs to done because Post Offices Ltd is determined to close some offices come what may. The chief executive will, allegedly, receive a large bonus for closing sub-post offices within a stipulated

WHILE your petition is to be welcomed, I feel much more needs to done because Post Offices Ltd is determined to close some offices come what may.

The chief executive will, allegedly, receive a large bonus for closing sub-post offices within a stipulated time scale. In the place of rural sub-offices, the company is offering an outreach service, which appears to be some form of mobile postal office. That is not a satisfactory solution. There is however, a simple alternative.

I'm sure that an analysis of rural post office transactions will show that less than 20 per cent of the services currently available account for 80 per cent of the transactions. Accordingly, all that is needed is an agency service whereby local shops can sell stamps and accept letters and parcels.

Obviously the fee for this would be quite modest, but it would bring customers into the shops and ensure that those customers did not need to undertake long journeys just to send parcels or a few letters that are either bulky or intended for foreign destinations.

This is something that Royal Mail and its subsidiary could have done years ago. If both companies had decent management, they would have.

The incompetence and inefficiency of the highly overpaid directors of Royal Mail also need to be exposed.

The sorting office in St Ives occupies the first floor of the building that formerly housed the post office in Bridge Street, which is a prime location. Much of the ground floor is unoccupied. Lugging mail upstairs, sorting it and taking it down again is hardly the most efficient way of doing things. Having a half empty building in a prime site is gross incompetence.

In July this year, I received an invoice of nearly £400 for Freepost services extending over a period of nearly two years. Furthermore, it had taken them nearly six months to respond to my written request for such an invoice. I shudder to think just how much money was very late in being invoiced during the last two years.

The sorting and delivery service in Cambridge has been a disgrace for many years. The worst example of local management incompetence occurred some years ago but it illustrates their failings very aptly.

A reorganisation of mail collection routes was carried out. The person responsible seems to have failed to take into account the fact that traffic gets very heavy after 5pm. For two days, no mail was collected from the Sidgwick Avenue site of Cambridge University. On the third day, the Royal Mail driver was found wandering around the site in the dark an hour and a half after the scheduled collection time. He didn't know where the mail box was and, even worse, he didn't have a key for it either.

These inefficiencies all cost money which, if eliminated, would help to improve the finances of the whole group.

COLIN SAUNDERSON, St Ives Liberal Democrats, Cedar Road, St Ives