Postal Services Bill

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness for giving such a detailed answer, including a good number of commitments, which are reassuring. I think she overcharacterised this amendment as too rigid. It does not say that every post office should have the whole range of services, nor does it say that the access criteria can never be altered. By this amendment, I was trying to establish whether the commitment to the 11,500 post offices is an absolute commitment or whether there is some headroom in the criteria. The noble Baroness has made it absolutely clear on several occasions tonight that the commitment is to a network of 11,500, although that is not to say that one or two might change location and quite a few might change the services that they offer and the sub-postmaster or mistress who runs them might change. You need that flexibility. My remaining anxiety is that, although I recognise that different levels of post office would have different gradations of services, we have to allow some flexibility and some change over time as the market develops, particularly in the growth businesses. It is also important that there is some criterion for the distance to main post offices which cover the whole range of services. I think the noble Baroness said that in addition to the general criteria in relation to post office outlets, there would be some criteria about the maximum distance that people were from a main post office, or a post office—different terms are used—which offered pretty much the whole range of services. If she said that, that is more reassurance. We have a number of things on the record, including the Government’s very clear commitment to the size of the network. I hope that within that there is not a serious diminution in the range of services which a large part of the network offers, and I certainly hope that the distance to main post offices is taken up. Subject to that, I shall be happy to withdraw the amendment at this stage. Amendment 22A withdrawn. Amendment 22B Moved by