Re: Keeping the beaurocracy alive... @AC 8:13
Any postal service can securely deliver your bank card or your next tax disc or evidence for your job application.
You are quite wrong to disregard people's comment if they have no day-to-day need for the Post Office or Royal Mail, as both are government-owned organisations. And people do understand the concept of the last mile system operated by Royal Mail. Royal Mail -- quite rightly -- deliberately takes advantage of its infrastructure to avoid replication of this delivery stage. It profits from this; it's not that others can't be bothered.
But the services you've described are provided by Royal Mail, not by the Post Office. Even with the Post Office acting as a customer's physical entry point to Royal Mail's services (as opposed to online), they do not make the Post Office essential. You know fully well that, in theory, Royal Mail could contract directly with any high street presence to be its customer interface, thereby dispensing with the Post Office altogether. We would lament the loss of the brand, the editor of the Daily Mail would receive some angry letters (I wonder how they'd be delivered) but we would have the same services you've listed and life goes on.
This article is about the Post Office, not about Royal Mail. And if the Post Office were wound up tomorrow as a result of Horizon failures then we would still have the same universal postal system we've always had.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
