When Peter Rickard moved to Thornhill 29 years ago, there were four shops in the village. Now only one remains.
When Peter Rickard moved to Thornhill 29 years ago, there were four shops in the village. Now only one remains.
The general store, in the village's Main Street, doubles up as the post office and offers a full range of services, six days a week.
However, under proposals published by Post Office Ltd, the local branch will be one of three around Stirling to be closed and replaced by an outreach service.
It will mean that the 650 residents and scores of people who pass through the village every day will have to access alternative facilities, probably served by a mobile postal van visiting the village for two hours every weekday.
For many of the residents, the proposals came as a "bolt out of the blue". Mr Rickard, 60, secretary of the Thornhill and Blairdrummond Community Council, said: "My first reaction was shock. In January Alistair Darling said that there would be no further closures in specific postcode areas, including Stirling. We thought we were safe."
Three communities around Stirling - Thornhill,Gargunnock and Buchlyvie - will be among the 500 outreach branches across the UK's newly revamped post office network. Instead of permanent post office counters, services will be offered via a mobile post office, a "hosted" service within a shop or community service, a "partner" service in premises such as a pub, or a home delivery service.
Post Office Ltd, a separate company within Royal Mail Group responsible for 14,300 UK post office branches, has drawn up six designated areas for its closure programme in Scotland and so far published plans for one of them, covering Greater Glasgow, Central Scotland and Argyll & Bute.
However, further reductions are expected when the remaining five area plans are published, with Post Office Ltd admitting that 500 outreach branches are being proposed in the UK as part of measures to reduce the network by 2500.
Consultation on the outreach services has begun, although Post Office Ltd has signalled that its preferred option is a mobile post office, based from Kippen and travelling round the three other communities.
It would offer 10 hours a week of facilities for both Thornhill and Gargunnock and eight hours for Buchlyvie.
Residents of Thornhill, however, are unhappy with this proposal. "The Post Office say that they are not closing it and make out that the outreach service is wonderful," said Mr Rickard, who also works as a part-time postman.
"But, in fact, they are reducing our service availability from 37.5 hours to 10 hours. Outreach services are probably very good for certain communities but we believe our village post office makes a profit and should remain open."
In May, the government produced its response to a public consultation on the post office network and said that changes were necessary to counteract losses which had risen from £2m a week in 2005/06 to £4m a week in 2006/07.
The first local public consultations for Scotland were launched on October 23 and proposed the 308 branches in Greater Glasgow, Central Scotland and Argyll & Bute should be reduced to 264.
A branch access report has been published for each of the 44 post offices which are under threat of closure but Post Office Ltd has not produced comparable information for the three branches proposed for outreach services.
Sandra White, SNP MSP, previously branded the post office consultation a "sham" after discovering that if one branch was removed from the list of closures, another within the area would have to be chosen. Yesterday, she questioned outreach services, saying: "I would be desperately worried about this."
A spokeswoman for the Royal Mail said the remaining five area plans were still to be developed and they could not, therefore, confirm how many outreach services would be in operation in Scotland.
Public to have their say
The areas and the dates for the six-week consultation period (first one has started)
1 Greater Glasgow, Central Scotland, Argyll and Bute: 23/10/2007
2 Highlands of Scotland: 08/01/2008
3 Northern and Western Isles: 04/03/2008
4 North East, Tayside, Fife: 29/04/2008
5 Ayrshire, Inverclyde, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire: 24/06/2008
6 Edinburgh, Lothians and South of Scotland: 22/07/2008
