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Postal Services Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her comments. I think that these interventions are making an impression on the Minister. I am sure that he is well aware from his own experience of the social role that post offices play and that he will have taken that into account. I hope that when I sit down after having made a suggestion to him, he might be able to agree with me, throw me a little red meat, be kind and make all of us feel a bit better as a result of the debate. I have talked about support for the elderly and young mums—the people without transport. The Government say that there is not a social element to their thinking, but there needs to be, as they will sure find out, as individual Members of Parliament. If people find out some six months or a year before the next general election that that has not been taken into account, those colleagues will be kicked pretty hard, I can assure them, because that happened to many of us in the previous round of closures. Many of our post offices are sizeably dependent on Royal Mail. A third of our local post offices' revenue comes from the sale of Royal Mail products and services. When the split happens—I am not arguing against that per se at the moment—it will be possible to withdraw, change and alter pricing for those products and services, and that could impact detrimentally on post offices. The related income to our local post offices is £343 million—not to be sneezed at. More than 30% of the wages of the people who work in our local post offices is paid for via these services—that is, some £250 million. Withdraw that, and we withdraw a whole work force of many tens of thousands of people. There are also the 900 post offices that are mail work sub-post offices, which means that they provide the premises and facilities and supervise the mail delivery—a vital element of the role of our sub-post offices in terms of the larger business of communication and mail. That applies to more than 14% of our rural post offices. Unless there is a pre-arranged business relationship, any organisation coming in will see that as a real opportunity to save costs immediately.