Postal Services Bill

The hon. Gentleman is clearly under the misapprehension that public service is about nothing more than making money. We must accept that the public sometimes have to pay for the delivery of a public service in a way that does not satisfy accountants. We have a health service that costs £100 billion. No one says that it is in deficit. We have a defence system that effectively requires us to pay out all the money: we are not given any proper help. The postal service is also a quality public service that we should be proud of. The Labour Government invested a large amount of public money in it, but the truth is that we did not succeed. We were maintaining post offices that we had to accept were effectively a drain on public resources. The question that we must ask, and the question that people in the country will ask, is whether this is money well spent, and I would argue that it is.