TWENTY-SEVEN Crown Post Offices in Scotland are to be closed and sold

off within the next financial year, according to a senior source within

PO Counters, the Communications Workers Union said yesterday.

The leak comes as PO Counters employees in Glasgow and district

prepare to stage their second 24-hour strike on Monday week in protest

at the closure and sell-off programme which has seen 130 Crown offices

close in Scotland since 1988.

The CWU predicts that at the current rate of closures Scotland will

have no Crown Post Offices at all by the end of 1997. However, PO

Counters last night sought to dismiss the claims as ''scare-mongering

nonsense'' that would only cause alarm to staff and customers alike.

Scottish general manager Wendy Goldstraw declared: ''We are totally

committed to preserving the network of 2135 Post Offices in Scotland''

although, she added, this might mean changing the status of some wholly

owned POs and providing locations more in tune with shopping preferences

through partnership with retailers.

The union, created last month from the merger of the Union of

Communications Workers and the National Communications Union,

immediately seized upon the fact that Mrs Goldstraw never once mentioned

Crown POs in her statement. It claimed that it was verification that the

leak, from a previously reliable source, was accurate.

Mr Liam Murphy, CWU counters secretary for Scotland and Northern

Ireland, stressed that the union had never accused the PO of seeking to

dismantle the network, but of privatising Crown Offices by the back

door.

The union says it already has identified 10 of the offices to be

closed and is demanding that PO Counters ''come clean'' by publishing

its secret hit-list.

Those identified as being earmarked for closure are Glasgow George

Square, Saltcoats, Wishaw, Bellshill, Aberdeen Torry, Edinburgh Wester

Hailes, Possilpark, Greenock Cathcart Street, Greenock Nicholson Street,

and Wick.

Mr Murphy descibed the closure of dedicated, publicly owned Crown Post

Offices as a national disgrace and said that PO managers should have the

decency to reveal their plans to the public rather than doing deals to

sell off post offices behind closed doors.

''Despite the victory over PO privatisation last year, the industry is

being privatised by stealth as our post offices are being taken over by

supermarkets and other retail chains,'' he said, adding that the whole

closure programme was shoddy, sordid, and dishonest.

Mrs Goldstraw replied that management had been totally frank about

what it was doing and why it was being done. She added that some 95% of

all post offices were now run on an agency basis in partnership with PO

Counters. The threatened industrial action in Glasgow and Strathclyde

would gain nothing and would only inconvenience customers.

The almost total lack of communication between management and union

was demonstrated by conflicting accounts of last December's 24-hour

stoppage.

Mrs Goldstraw claimed it was a flop, with only 20 POs out of 700 not

opening, and Mr Murphy was adamant that some 36 of the targeted Crown

Offices were closed with only nine kept open by managers shipped in from

as far as Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Edinburgh and even Northern

Ireland.

The union and the Post Office did agree, however, that the

introduction of new technology was resulting in almost all first class

and much of the second class post being handled in first deliveries in a

growing number of areas.