---

Post Office Restructuring

Something we need to do at an early stage is to separate the Royal Mail and Post Office businesses. There should be much greater clarity about who does what. Some of the decisions are being made because of problems facing Royal Mail, and it is making up the shortfall in its funds by going through the process. That does not mean that Royal Mail should be in the private sector or the public sector, but there is confusion about how those businesses are run at the moment. My hon. Friend and neighbour, the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), brought that up particularly clearly when he described what is happening with the St. John's road post office. If someone is building up a business based on internet services, but is finding that that business will be more difficult because the post office he uses is being closed, Royal Mail may go to him and say that it will collect his packages every day, and give him a lower price than what the sub-postmaster would legally have been able to offer because postal prices for him are controlled, but Royal Mail can offer discounts. We could be in the absurd situation of Royal Mail undercutting post offices and offering prices that post offices could not legally offer. The Government set the framework, put the financial package in place, and chose to spread the social network package more thinly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) said. The Government restricted the offering of new services, set the number of closures and have been responsible for every element of the package that the Post Office has had to put in place—they set the access criteria and everything else. Therefore, people who are unhappy have no one else to blame. At the end of the day, the Government's policy is to manage the decline of the post office network, but they have failed to understand the wider nature of the programme. The post office is not only a business; it is part of the social fabric of our communities and of the social network. If someone does not come in to collect their pension, the sub-postmaster will be the first to notice and raise the alarm. The programme has lost sight of the wider value of post offices to too many communities, and they are seen only in terms of their economic role. The Minister will have seen that there is no support for the programme across the House. We have seen a significant amount of anger in the debate, but that will be doubled if people end up feeling that the consultation programme is just a sham. If at the end of the consultation the Government turn round and say, ““We have consulted, we have spent six weeks on it, but we will simply go ahead as we planned and close every single post office on our list””, people will rightly feel that the programme was a sham and it should be exposed as such. The Post Office cannot halt the programme—only the Minister can. He should go back to the drawing board, think again, create a better long-term vision for the Post Office, and bring more business into the unit, and not simply manage the decline. If he does not do those things, the lasting legacy of his time in office will be the irretrievable loss of services to our communities throughout the country.