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Postal Services Bill

If the hon. Gentleman looks at the record, he will see that the amount spent by the previous Government in paying out for closures of post offices—in other words, to people who left their post offices and took the King's shilling—came to much more than the sum proposed by the current Government over a four-year period. How much impact does the hon. Gentleman think there will be on post offices from losing the arrangement to do business for Royal Mail, in terms of closures, compared with the paltry sum that is being offered? It may in fact be spent on redundancies and closing post offices, as it has been in the past.