Tim Allen's Postmaster Ponderings: The 2025 NFSP Annual Conference

Holiday, a day-off, you hardly ever take one and when you do it’s a tough call to say you are going to spend from Saturday evening to late Monday afternoon at the NFSP Annual Conference talking and thinking about the same thing you spend the rest of the week thinking about.

Well, let me tell you, you’ll be glad you did as the management turnout from Post Office Ltd (PO) in 2025 on both Sunday and Monday was astonishing. The Chairman (first time ever?), Chief Executive, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technical Officer, Banking Director, Director of Mails, and, for good measure Gareth Thomas, the Postal Affairs Minister.

They came because the plan to turn PO on its head so that it serves postmasters rather than the other way round has substance, it’s serious and PO now have the courage to stand in front of us and tell us where it’s at.

For the second year Conference was held at the University of Warwick, this ultra -modern university has an on-site hotel and conference centre.

Conference commenced late Saturday afternoon, and time was spent considering the issue of PO grant funding for the NFSP which will cease in 2030. Planning is needed now because the current structure has a cost of just under £2m a year. For me the need for a postmaster advocacy body and an organisation that gives us both cohesion and a means of collective communication with PO and government is essential. “Lean-in” was a new phrase being used by the NFSP and if each of us starts by promising to find the time to complete the questionnaires we receive then that will be a good start.

To conclude Saturday, four postmasters addressed a range of topics from their perspectives, experience and urban or rural environments. Discussion about the co-operation and sharing of resource around the Wellbeing Initiative left me pondering whether there are more areas of PO back-office depth that postmasters could benefit from. HR and employment law questions, VAT issues and property law regarding leases are all matters of significant worry and cost to postmasters while resource, trained in these matters sits beyond our touch at PO HQ.

On Sunday, a leisurely breakfast was followed by a Retail Exhibition event where I found a new greeting card supplier. An order I placed there and then had new cards in my post office 48 hours later on 30-day credit terms.

The highlight of the afternoon was Neil Brocklehurst, now confirmed as PO CEO, and Andy Nice, the Chief Transformation Officer talking, in clear terms, about where they have got to with the transformation plans that have grown out of Nigel Railton’s Strategic Review, first revealed to us last October. You have to pinch yourself to remember that Neil is in the same job that less than a year ago Nick Read was occupying. I don’t know him but Neil, and Andy for that matter, come over as grounded people who have worked out what the objectives need to be, what the problems are and have a plan to fix it. This is important. Nick’s last set of accounts for 2023-24 shone a spotlight on the lack of money available to renumerate us and were mired in Horizon costs, management mistakes, overstaffing, and an expensive long running IT plan that this new management concluded needed scrapping.

Neil showed us a “situational assessment” and profit forecast that illustrated the rocks ahead if “no-change” of significance in the business structure and markets were to occur. He talked of the damaged, no-confidence, relationship PO under Nick had with government and then showed us the broad plan including 17 specific areas of work that is needed to achieve a business plan that is positive green instead of negative red. Lots of government money is needed for all of this and the question as to whether PO have governments support, at least in the short term, has been answered with some fresh investment funding to the tune of £300m to secure the first steps.

At the end of the session, it was remarkable to see postmasters crowding around Neil and Andy, eager to share questions and views. They must have felt mobbed — but I hope also inspired by the passion and commitment of the people they serve.

Last year that session would have been the headline act, but Monday was packed from beginning to end with focused topics and strong speakers. The warm-up was a “Mails Support Session”. The billed “warm-up” was an understatement as the closest I’ve seen to a riot ensued when the hall was told Evri have 97% success in either delivery or customer satisfaction. As a postmaster who doesn’t even have Evri, I couldn’t quite work it out amongst the noise and successive tales of Evri failure from missed collections to missing parcels. Conference demanded no contract be withdrawn from any branch for missing sales targets while Evri had so many operational problems of its own. If Neill O’Sullivan, the MD for Parcels and Mails, had any doubts over the importance of mails to postmasters he couldn’t possibly have left with those same doubts. Let’s hope he comes back next year and there’s a happier story to tell.

After a quick comfort break Neill was once again facing Conference along with Ross Borkett, the Banking Director, Paul Anastassi the Chief Technology Officer and Beth Foley from the Citizens Advice Bureau. Any hope Neill might have had for an easier session was quickly dashed when Sue Edgar made clear that the Mails Segregation bonus criteria is deeply unfair. Her points were well-received: that the £2million bonus should be distributed and that each branch should be subsequently judged on its own merit — not held back by others.

It was good to hear from Citizens Advice, this organisation came to Conference with a clear understanding of the impact on people of Digital Exclusion, the “hollowing-out” of the high street and the vital role a well enabled PO can have on the lives of individual people and communities. She spoke of Government Access Criteria and I, for one, hope this gets sharper as the apparent maintenance of 11,500 post offices mask the decline of post offices in rural areas and the degree to which many post offices are clinging on to continued existence by their fingernails.

Ross told us that new banking Rem announcements would be made in two weeks’ time at the next “Town-Hall” postmaster meeting and with Banking Framework 4 negotiations complete he and his team could more on to improving and increasing the services we can offer. Improvements already negotiated include the same Rem for a failed or successful banking deposit. “You have handled the money” said Ross “and it’s the banks issue not yours if the transaction is declined”. Thank goodness for Banking!

Paul faced multiple questions over the scrapping of NBIT, what its replacement would look like, when we are going to get it and our old “friend” Horizon. “There will be limited Horizon development” said Paul “It has a complex and unique architecture and adding new features to a product that needs replacing is not a good use of resource”. “NBIT was a like-for-like Horizon replacement, bespoke, over complicated, over expensive and made no sense.” Horizon’s replacement will be a “Composable Technology Platform” meaning open-standard, off-the-shelf, cloud-based, and not a custom build from scratch. In short: simpler, cheaper, faster. But even so it’s going to take time as PO still have to go out to market, receive bids, award a contract, build it and roll it out which will take a few years. How many? Paul mentioned five to seven years, but Neil had earlier been adamant he wants it faster than this as do we all.

A short sandwich lunch and it was back to our seats for the headline bill of PO Chairman Nigel Railton, the Postal Affairs Minister Gareth Thomas, Graeme Nuttall who was a government advisor on employee-owned organisations and our own Calum Greenhow.  To attempt to summarise almost two hours of actual answers to some considered questions does the session an injustice however we didn’t listen to waffle and it’s clear we have a Chairman who believes he will “change the polarity of Post Office” and that post offices must meet the challenge of being relevant and meeting the needs our communities.

He was straight forward and clear he “has the personal will and the strength of a team led by Neil Brocklehurst to convert and deliver the Strategic Plan”. Gareth Thomas exceeded my expectations, surprising me when he expressed a belief that government could strengthen communities by providing more banking for post offices and refusing to promise that which he could not. He urged each of us to contribute our thoughts to the Green Paper that is coming out in the next few months which will consider, and then be used, to shape the future of PO in the UK. Mr Nuttall set out a range of scenarios that are all proven elsewhere including the value of some shareholding for postmasters, a governance board exercising oversight and both a formal recognition of postmaster partnership and a PO answerable not just to government but postmasters too.    

I left Conference slightly exhausted — but buzzing with optimism. A future with proper pay, a buildable vision for a modern computer system, and the ability to truly serve our communities doesn’t feel like an untouchable dream anymore.

If you’ve read this far, please do your bit too “Lean in” — the phrase coined this year by the NFSP — and complete every questionnaire that comes your way. Our collective voice may matter more than you thought

Tim Allen

NFSP Joint Members’ Editor

and Kington Main Postmaster