Ms Debbie Byrne:

The structure of our contracts is that the more deep rural post offices are on the S52 contract for exactly the reason the Deputy has mentioned. They were never asked in the first place to move off that contract for exactly that reason. Our whole mantra has been around protecting those smaller post offices. There are fixed and transactional elements to that. Many of the new services, including the current account offering, for example, are in addition. That is an opportunity for those post offices to earn more. We have never approached deep rural post offices and asked them to go onto the new contract. There is a cohort that were never written to about the new contract for exactly that reason.

There is what we call the squeezed middle. People who are in population areas that are not as big as some urban areas are more challenged. That is absolutely the case. We work with those postmasters to try to unlock cross-selling. Mr. Watt is running a great programme called great conversations.