Post Office to withdraw mortgage service from shops

The Post Office on Thursday said it would now only offer its mortgages online, resulting in a number of jobs losses.

The decision to stop selling mortgages over the counter would result in 73 redundancies and generated an angry response from the Unite union, which has more than 600 managers working in the Post Office.

Unite national officer Brian Scott said: “This is particularly disappointing as it was not many years ago that the Post Office launched this mortgage product, provided by the Bank of Ireland, in a fanfare of publicity suggesting that this will be a solution to the myriad of challenges it faces."

“Once again the senior management at the Post Office has failed in its attempt to make the network meaningful and relevant to the public”.

Unite has called the decision another “nail in the coffin” in the public service remit and that the Post Office had shown it has no clear strategy or business plan for the future.

“The mortgage advisers work in post offices currently. The management is moving to a plan where people will have to phone a call centre for mortgage advice. However, it is less than five years since top executives trumpeted that mortgages would be a profitable product in post offices,” Scott said.

The Post Office said it was changing its strategy as a way of becoming a more sustainable business and it needs to continually review the effectiveness of their actions and be customer focused.

"As part of this, we are introducing a new model for handling mortgage enquiries and applications, working in conjunction with our branch network. Unfortunately, this means that we have had to make the difficult decision of moving away from providing the face to face mortgage advice which has until now been available in a limited number of our branches.

"We will now begin a consultation with our team of mortgage specialists around the future of their roles. This is of course a difficult time for these colleagues and we will be offering them one to one support as we work with them to understand their preferences for their future careers, either in or outside the Post Office," said a spokesperson from the Post Office.