Thousands of post offices face being sold or axed under secret plans to streamline the scandal-hit business, it is claimed.
Campaigners believe bosses want to offload up to 6,000 loss-making branches – over half the network – and turn the Post Office into a John Lewis -style “mutual” company run by staff.
The shock move would help draw a line under the IT fiasco that saw thousands of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of stealing from their branches.
It has left the taxpayer with a bill of up to £1billion in compensation and legal fees and the Post Office looking for new ways to secure its future.
Ex-postmistress Sally Stringer, giving evidence at the public inquiry into the scandal, said she was left stunned when officials discussed scaling down the state-owned network.
During mediation talks with other workers, one executive told them: “Well, of course, we will only have 5,000 offices when we mutualise.”
She said: “I looked at her and said, ‘Really? You’ve got 11,000 offices now, so you’re going to reduce by 6,000 offices…’”
Ms Stringer, who ran a post office in Beckford, Gloucs, for 20 years, told the inquiry such closures would be “fundamentally and utterly wrong”.
Plans to mutualise the PO were proposed nearly a decade ago but the idea was dropped.
Mark Baker, of the Communication Workers Union, thinks the PO wants to give postmasters a share in its ownership. But he says this would only work if it ditched unprofitable branches and the Government ran them like a local library service.
He said: “You wouldn’t get much resistance from post-masters if full compensation was paid. But customers would be very upset.”
The Government has said it is committed to maintaining the 11,500-branch network at its current level across the UK.
The Post Office said: “Our network of 11,500 branches has been stable for the last decade and we’ve seen a net growth in our network of 181 branches between the end of March 2021 and December 2021 alone.”
