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Royal Mail

My hon. Friend is correct to point to a growth in packet volumes as a result of people ordering over the internet, but that is not enough to counteract the falling volumes of mail. Overall, mail has fallen by 5 million items a day. My hon. Friend takes us back to the issue that the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) and other Members raised by contending that the principal problem facing the company is competition from other postal companies and the terms by which that competition is conducted. Hooper concludes that that is not the case, and that the impact of that is just one fifth of the impact of the shift from mail to other technologies. Therefore, changing the regime for upstream access or headroom pricing will not deal with the Royal Mail's problems. That demands wider change and wider reform.