Modella, the private equity group that bought and rebranded WH Smith's high street stores as TG Jones last year, is closing roughly a third of the chain's post offices. Thirty-six have already shut in 2025 and another 34 are scheduled to go by early 2027. The total — 70 post office closures within TG Jones stores — sits inside a broader cull of up to 150 of the 450 shops Modella acquired, with 110 store closures already announced. The damage compounds. These closures land on top of 52 post offices shutting inside Morrisons Daily convenience stores this year, part of Morrisons' plan to close 100 loss-making small shops. Towns such as Stevenage, Bracknell, and Orpington are each losing two post offices in months. Telford's last post office is due to close in January. Hull and York face double hits. What makes this particularly corrosive is that the majority of the lost TG Jones sites replaced former crown post offices — the directly operated, full-service branches that once numbered over 100 and have now been almost entirely closed. These were the branches handling identity checks, passport services, driving licences, and banking. The replacements are now themselves being replaced by nothing. The economic knock-on is documented by the Post Office's own evidence to Parliament: almost a third of small and medium businesses use their local branch weekly, and more than half visit monthly. Many report that losing access would threaten their viability within months. After 6,800 bank branch closures across the UK, these post offices were often the last financial infrastructure standing. The Post Office says it has interest in every closing location — "in some locations over 40 applications" — and claims commitment to replacing every branch. The record so far is thin: one permanent replacement (Stirling) has reopened, Ipswich is due in November, and temporary branches are planned for Maidenhead and Uxbridge. That is four answers for 70 closures. The CWU union calls it the creation of "postal deserts" — the predictable result of a long-term strategy that prioritises cost-cutting over service access. The pattern is familiar: a public utility is outsourced to commercial operators, commercial operators are acquired by private equity, private equity restructures for margin, and communities absorb the loss. The Post Office itself is hardly in a position to resist, still reeling from the Horizon IT scandal and having announced its own 100-branch closures in late 2024. The network is being hollowed from both ends — the state-owned operator shrinking its own footprint while the commercial hosts it depends on are rationalised by investors whose obligations run to creditors, not communities.
