QUESTION—OBSERVATIONS. (Hansard, 14 July 1890)

*LORD STANLEY OF ALDERLEY,

in rising to ask Her Majesty's Government if they could not arrange for rural Post Office appointments being made by the General Post Office instead of by the Treasury and the County Members, said: My Lords, although recent events might suggest that this is a fitting time to ask Her Majesty's Government to in some 1584 measure free the General Post Office from the incubus of the Treasury, Twill on the present occasion confine myself to a minor point. It is now the practice that if a vacancy occurs in a country Post Office the Treasury are first communicated with; the Treasury then ask the County Member to nominate someone. Very often the County Member may not be acquainted with the circumstances of the case, of what the requirements may be, or suggest a really fitting appointment. Moreover, since the Secretary of the Treasury has been deprived of his patronage, and as patronage in general has been abolished by competitive examination, it is no use taking away the substance and preserving the shadow by giving to the County Members these small appointments. As I have said, the County Members are very often really unacquainted with the circumstances of the place; they may even reside at a great distance from it, and they are liable to give the appointments to some supporter of their own without regard to qualifications or circumstances. In addition to these hypothetical objections to the present system, I may as well give your Lordships instances from my own experience. Some years ago in a village in Cheshire there was no Post Office. I asked for one to be established. At the same time, I put up a small building in the centre of the village which I intended to be used for the Post Office. For some time I heard nothing more about the matter, and at last it turned out that the Post Office had been established in some other less convenient place, and the building has now been let for the purposes of the County Constabulary. The man who holds the Post Office is now desirous of throwing it up. I have been asked to build another house, but I declined, as I did so once, and no notice was taken of it in consequence of these Treasury and Post Office arrangements. "It would, in fact, be useless for anyone to build a house for a Post Office unless he is tolerably certain by communication with the Post Office through their Inspector that the house will be made use of. I will mention another case which occurred many years ago. A County Member wrote to me saying, "Your Post Office is vacant; I know nothing about it myself; tell me whom you recommend." I wrote back 1585 to him: "Please do not move until I settle it with the General Post Office." I then wrote to Sir John Tilley and said, "Why is this Post Office vacant? I think I ought to have been consulted first." He answered that "it was vacant because the person who was appointed to it had never gone there." I said it "had been managed by his sister, and had never been better managed; and the person appointed did not wish at present, for family reasons, to leave the neighbouring town; that his father and grandfather had long been supplying contracts for the Post Office, and did not deserve such summary treatment, and I asked to have things left as they were." But supposing this County Member had not been an acquaintance of mine, he might have appointed somebody else, and then there would have been an unnecessary complication. I hope, therefore, Her Majesty's Government will arrange that in future the General Post Office, through their Inspectors, will manage these matters and make the appointments. I can only speak of the Cheshire and North Wales district, but I wish to say that the Postmaster General and his Inspector have introduced a good many reforms, and if the rest of the country is equally well served, the people should be very well satisfied.