Post Office Limited
British retail post office company owned by the government of the United Kingdom
Post Office Limited (formerly Post Office Counters Limited from 1987–2001) is a state-owned retail post office company in the United Kingdom that provides a wide range of postal and non-postal related products including postage stamps, banking, insurance, bureau de change and identity verification services to the public. It does this through its nationwide network of around 11,500 post office branches, which are run by franchise partners or by independent business people known as subpostmasters, under contracts with the Post Office.
Since 2020, a public enquiry has been under way into the company's actions which led to between 700 and 900 subpostmasters being wrongfully prosecuted for financial crimes, in what has been described by the Criminal Cases Review Commission as "the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history".
History
Post Office branches, along with the Royal Mail delivery service, were formerly part of the General Post Office. After the passage of the Post Office Act 1969 the Post Office became a statutory corporation, with a network of almost 25,000 post office branches, including 1,765 Crown branches. Post Office Counters Limited was created as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Post Office in 1987. The first managing director of Post Office Counters was John Roberts, who took up the post in 1987.
In 1989, Crown branches began to be franchised to reduce costs, and the Crown network fell from 1,493 to 606 by 1997. A moratorium on further franchising was imposed by the New Labour government, but this was lifted the following year on the condition that 15% of revenue came from the Crown network. A former civil servant, Richard Dykes, took over as managing director of Post Office Counters in September 1993.
“Post Office Limited” enters the record as british retail post office company owned by the government of the United Kingdom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Post, Office and Limited can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1783168. VIAF identifies the subject as 126881798. The Library of Congress control number is n2006002070. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 2001, 2020 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Post Office Limited” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.