Royal Mail and the Post Office

I was just about to come to the value of the universal service obligation, as someone who represents a rural area. Last Monday evening, I spoke to a local community group that wanted to talk about post office closures. By the end of the meeting, the group agreed with me that, in a rural area, the universal service obligation is every bit as important as their local post office, because no one else is coming forward to go 2 miles up a farm track, six days a week, to deliver a letter. That will not happen unless it is done by Royal Mail, which is why I fully agree that if there is anything we can do to get other carriers to make a significant contribution to that last mile, we should make every attempt to do it. On the Post Office network change programme, I have still to go through what I suspect will be the pain of the closure programme in my constituency. I currently have 57 post offices, three of which are on outreach, and I am not taking any bets on how many might be lost. One of them is classed as being temporarily closed, and one is working in a partnership. We have to look more widely than what we have witnessed in communities over many years. The network change programme comes to my constituency in mid-August. Mrs. Brown, who is expecting to go on holiday in mid-August, will be disappointed, but she will know nothing about it because she does not read Hansard on a daily basis. There is no way that I will leave my constituency in mid-August when that news breaks. The Post Office is unable to compete. PayPoint, which has been mentioned, has 17,000 outlets and 300 staff, so it is a mammoth task to compete for business. We always throw to the floor the change regarding TV licences, but that has saved the BBC £100 million.