Royal Mail and the Post Office

I shall give way in a moment. The debate is not only about transactional services online but about how we communicate with one another. When I said that something significant is happening in the mails market, I meant that the volume of mail once tracked economic growth—they were like two peas in a pod; they would go up together and come down together. Over the last couple of years, however, the total volume of mail has declined by about 3 million items a day. It would be complacent of us to place that at the door of the liberalised mails market.