Towns and even city centres face being left as "postal deserts" after it emerged that more than a third of the post offices inside the troubled TG Jones chain are closing.
So far this year 36 branches within the high street chain formerly known as WH Smith have closed, and a further 34 are set to close by early 2027, according to Post Office records analysed by the Guardian.
TG Jones was bought and renamed by the private equity group Modella last year. Before the restructure won approval from creditors in July, the chain operated 180 post offices, and it had been feared that as many as 60 could be closed under the shake-up.
Up to 150 of the 450 stores acquired by Modella are expected to shut, about 65 of which have already closed, with at least another 46 to cease operating early next year. The resulting total of 110 announced closures includes the 70 that contain post offices.
The wave follows an announcement in the summer that 52 post offices will close within Morrisons Daily convenience stores this year, some of them close to TG Jones sites. That move forms part of a wider plan by Morrisons to close 100 loss-making small stores.
Stevenage, Bracknell and Orpington, and the smaller cities of Hull and York, are each losing two post offices in a matter of months. Telford's last one is due to close in January. Essex, the West Midlands, Wales, Suffolk and Hertfordshire have been particularly hard hit, with six going in Essex, five in the West Midlands and four in Wales.
The majority of the lost sites had themselves replaced former crown post offices, the now almost entirely closed network of more than 100 directly operated large branches that offered a full suite of services including identity and passport checks, driving licence and banking operations.
The stakes for local economies are documented. As the Post Office told a parliamentary inquiry into revitalising high streets, almost a third of small and medium-sized businesses use their local branch at least once a week and more than half use the network at least once a month. After the closure of more than 6,800 bank branches across the UK, the state-owned company's evidence said the Post Office "plays a critical role in protecting this essential service". Operators already run 250 banking hubs.
Mole Meade, a senior member at the CWU, the largest union for postal workers, said the closures would leave some areas as "postal deserts" and described them as "the continuation of a long-term strategy of cutting costs and chasing profit, with little regard for the communities that depend on post office services".
The Post Office said it had proactively sought expressions of interest from postmasters and partners. "There is interest in taking on every location where it has been confirmed that a post office within a TG Jones store will close," it said. "In some locations there are over 40 applications from our postmasters who recognise the significant footfall operating a post office brings to their store." It said it was committed to replacing every branch that closes.
So far one site has reopened after a TG Jones closure, at Stirling. A permanent replacement for Ipswich is set to open in November, and temporary branches are to operate after the closures in Maidenhead and Uxbridge. TG Jones was approached for comment.
Read as a market signal, the figures are unambiguous. A branch that is open attracts no applications at all. A branch that has been confirmed as closing attracts, in some locations, more than forty.
Demand for the right to run a post office is therefore at its highest precisely where there is no post office, and collapses to nothing the moment one exists. Our analysts can identify no other retail category in which supply so reliably destroys interest in itself.
The mechanism is not in dispute, because the Post Office has stated it. Postmasters recognise the significant footfall that operating a post office brings to their store, and the most direct way to establish the size of that footfall is to remove the branch and count what happens next.
On the published numbers the network is consequently in excellent health: seventy closures, over forty expressions of interest in some of them, and one reopening in Stirling. The Department of Unnecessary Research puts the sector's ratio of enthusiasm to premises at its strongest recorded level.
A postal desert, properly understood, is not a place with no post offices. It is a place where everybody wants to run one.