Royal Mail and the Post Office

I assume that the players at Derby are getting a bonus, but I am not sure whether it is totally deserved. I will pass on quickly. My last point, to return to the issue raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), relates to investment and innovation. We cannot pretend—this is why we cannot turn back the clock—that everything will come from the top down and that the £1.7 billion will be turned into £3.4 billion as a result of ever-increasing investment. It is good that the Government have invested in the Post Office—previous Governments did not and instead took money out of it—but we must understand that there are other sources of funding that we can make available. Pleasingly, the Government announced today that they will introduce a community empowerment Bill, although some of us thought that we already had one in the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, but never mind—we will reinvent it. However, if there is great support for post offices out there in communities and if those communities want to keep their post offices open, why do we not challenge them? Why do we not tell them, ““Find some financial means, find the volunteers and take on the responsibility.””? Let us see this as a partnership. It can work. Community shops in my area work in that way, so why can we not see such an approach as an absolute winner? At the moment, all we seem to do is shut down facilities and tell communities, ““Sorry. We don't want a presence in your part of the world.”” We need to rethink the ideology and to turn what is happening into a community opportunity, not something that is about closures. There are plenty of challenges. The Minister probably has the most difficult job in the Government; it used to be the Immigration Minister who had the most difficult job, but now it is probably whoever deals with the Post Office. The Minister therefore has plenty to do, but we are all here to support him. I hope that he will make some nice comments about what my little programme would do.