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Royal Mail

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for that intervention. I draw his attention to the amendment that I tabled, which is a fairly accurate reflection of the policy that we adopted at our conference three years ago, which I believe is widely available. I shall come to that point in some detail in a moment. I want to look at the opportunities that flow from the report. The first is the real chance to help the post office network. I again want to make the distinction between the Post Office and the Royal Mail. Many of our constituents think that they are one and the same thing, but there is a real difference. Hooper recommends that the post office network remain in the public sector, with which I wholeheartedly agree, but I believe that we should go beyond that. We should take it out of the Royal Mail group and make it a separate entity, with a separate board dealt with by the shareholder executive, so that it is clearly and distinctly separate from the Royal Mail and from whatever might happen to it. I would also like that board to have some stakeholder representation, particularly by sub-postmasters, as that would help to inform its future. A key point would be for the post office network to be a separately owned and managed entity that was not bound up in whatever future the Royal Mail might have.