Postal Services Bill

As ever, my hon. Friend makes an important and valid point. Those who inherit this Bill, when it becomes an Act, will need to take that on board. I think I am one of the few people in the House who was once employed by the Post Office. I joined the company in 1973, when it was Post Office Telecommunications. It then became British Telecommunications—that was the first significant split—and it was then privatised. The rest is history, as they say. Many people still refer to that great British institution as the General Post Office, even though it must be 40 or 50 years since the GPO ceased to exist—I am not sure exactly when it was—in the same way that they still refer to the boy scouts, even though they have not been boy scouts for decades. Returning to the point that the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) made, I am grateful for this trip down memory lane because when the previous Postal Services Bill came before the House, the shadow Chancellor was the responsible Minister and he had some harsh words to say about the previous Administration. He said:"““If I was being kind, I would call their stewardship maladroit. If I was being unkind, I would say that Postman Pat's black and white cat would have provided better stewardship of the Post Office over the term of the previous Government.””—[Official Report, 15 February 2000; Vol. 344, c. 868.]" It is fair to say that we are now back to the modern Postman Pat and the Specsavers advert. There are 11,905 post offices in the UK, the vast majority of which are sub-post offices run as franchises by sub-postmasters.