SWINDON could lose a third of its sub-post offices under a national closure programme sweeping the country.

The Post Office is closing about 3,000 of the UK's 9,000 urban sub-post offices in an attempt to stem huge financial losses.

If the pattern is repeated in Swindon, nine of the town's 28 sub-post offices could be axed.

Customers will find out which have been earmarked for closure at the end of June.

David Hide, chairman of Wiltshire Postwatch, the official watchdog for postal services, said: "There is no indication which ones will go but on average a third will close.

"The Post Office is losing a huge amount of money every day and the transaction volumes of post offices are falling."

Reasons for declining business include the availability of postage stamps in shops, and a move by the Department of Work and Pensions to offer to pay benefits directly into claimants' bank accounts.

Post Office Ltd lost £200m in the last financial year, and the company believes there are too many post offices in the UK.

Its closure plan, which it has called the Urban Network Reinvention Programme, is a last-ditch attempt to make itself profitable.

To help things along it is offering sub-post masters and mistresses two years' pay if they volunteer to shut up shop.

The closures have started already. In the Reading area six sub-post offices have been closed, with another one under threat.

Mr Hide said Postwatch had no powers to prevent closures but would use its position to influence where the axe fell.

"If we think a post office should stay open we will say so," he said.

"We want to ensure everyone has access to a post office. But we have to recognise some will close."

Adrian Booth, spokesman for Post Office Ltd, said keeping all of them open was not an option.

"It's not our desire to shut post offices," he said. "We don't want to do it but this is a survival situation and we can't sustain that kind of loss.

"We want to make sure our customers have a reasonable network left in place to give them access to our services."

He said that once the closure programme was finished 95 per cent of customers would still live within a mile of a post office.

Meanwhile, residents of Shaw are continuing their campaign to stop Tesco shutting the post office in the One Stop Shop. The supermarket giant wants to get rid of it to make space for other products when it turns the store into a Tesco Express later this year.

Andy Tate