Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment he has made of the impact of Post Office closures on elderly and digitally excluded residents in rural communities.

My Department conducted social value research into the most frequent users of the Post Office to feed into the Green Paper on the Future of the Post Office, which we published last year. This research showed that the most frequent users are typically older, from more rural areas, or less confident using digital technology. In the Government’s Response to the Green Paper, we committed to protecting access to services for these and other users by retaining the minimum requirement of 11,500 Post Office branches and all six geographical Access Criteria. This means, for example, that 99% of the UK population must be within three miles of a Post Office.