Listening post
FOR someone whose retail business has been described as making the Co-op look like Laura Ashley (City and Suburban, 13 June), John Roberts is remarkably cordial. He is managing director of the Post Office's counter services. Yes, the painters and decorators are working their way round, and where he can he will have 'Post Shops' on the customer's side of the counter. Yes, it is high time to bring the computer to the counter, and the first stage of a nationwide plan will start in the Thames Valley in two years time. Yes, stamp machines that work, 2,000 new.nnes in the autumn. Yes, part-timers for peak hours, to cut the queues, if proposals agreed with the union are carried on a ballot. Two other questions would have been tactless to ask, and are easily answered. Have the post offices suffered from being used as a dumping ground for any and every self-important government department? (Mr Roberts has at last suc- ceeded in charging the Min of Ag for putting up its posters about the colorado beetle.) Have the counter services been starved of investment, in the long years when all the money went behind the scenes into mechanical sorting? No money until lately to spend on the scuffed linoleum floors, or to give clerks better calculating equipment than pencil stubs and scrap paper, but millions for devices which one day may be able to decipher addresses and post codes in my handwriting, provided the union can be induced to be happy with them. For the fruits of that, see the thoroughly disconsolate letter from Brian Smith on page 26.
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