22 March, 2002

John Sheard laments plans by Consignia to charge rural folk for using cash machines and asks what happened to Victorian ideals of nationwide parity.

THE VICTORIANS, God bless 'em, have had a pretty bad press for more than a century now. In the public mind, they are depicted as greedy, grasping Mr Gradgrinds trampling the poor to build their industrial empires in coal, textiles and railways.

And, indeed, there was some truth in these Dickensian images because 19th Century entrepreneurs were mighty supporters of the profit motive. However, they demonstrated one major difference to today's controllers of the national purse strings:

They were happy to see those profits spent in ways which benefited the public good in general and the country's working infrastructure in particular.

Contrast that with today's attitude of Consignia, the strange name chosen by some bright spark to replace the sonorous Royal Mail, which this week promised to install cash machines at some 4,000 post offices, 800 of them in rural areas.

Trouble is, townies using these machine will be able to do so free. We country folk will have to pay £1.25 per transaction which - as one correspondent pointed out - would pay for enough diesel for a car owner to drive some 20 miles, often enough to get to and from the nearest town (and save even more by shopping at the local supermarket).

Now when Her Majesty Queen Victoria's Royal Mail was first instituted - along with the famous Penny Black stamp - Parliament laid down one simple rule: the mail should be delivered to every home in the British Isles, irrespective of its remoteness.

Now this would have not made sense to those hard headed Victorian penny pinchers except for one thing: prices were set in such a way that the profits from the "easy" deliveries in the towns and cities would subsidise those in rural areas, a system which would patently boost the country's infrastructure.

Today, of course, nobody gives a fig about the infrastructure: that's why our roads, railways, telephones and postal service are falling to bits. The Government wants to privatise the post office and Consignia would like to "cherry pick" urban postal services and wave rural ones a disinterested Goodbye.

The nonsense of all this, of course, is that the Government keeps on saying that it wants to revive the rural economy, as it did with the debacle of foot and mouth, by cancelling bypasses to rural villages being choked to death by tourist traffic, and as it is also trying to do by banning fox hunting.

I suspect we would all be a lot better off if this particular Government forgot about the countryside - which it patently doesn't understand - and let us get on with things ourselves.

• For this reason, I urge you to join the CLA's "send a post card, save a post office" campaign, which is designed to make Consignia take its rural responsibilities more seriously. Please send a postcard or your town or village, with a demand that your post office be saved, to:

Ms Tasneem Azad, Deputy Director, Competition and Regulation Directorate, Postcomm, Hercules House, Hercules Road London SE1 7DB