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Question: What impact will post office closures have on local residents?

Charles Hendry: Our research shows that it will have a very damaging on communities up and down the country. What we are finding is that communities are coming together, holding public meetings, organising petitions because they are very concerned indeed about the impact of theses closures.

Very often it is not just the post office at risk but the village shop as well.

Question: How will local businesses be affected?

Charles Hendry: First of all 2,500 post offices will be forced to close however much they want to stay open, and on top of that there are many businesses that are dependent on the post office for their viability, and so if they lose the post office they will have to close.

Worse than that the Post Office appears to be putting in place criteria for anybody who wishes to go on in business after the post office is closed to ensure they cannot work with other carriers or open up a pay-point facility or a National Lottery terminal, which for many would be the final nail in the coffin and would force them to close.

Question: Are you concerned about some elderly people losing their independence because of closures?

Charles Hendry: Our concern is that it will be older people and the disabled who suffer the most, they are the ones who are least able to travel to the next post office and quite often we have found that the bus service is not very good or there is a steep hill.

So it will make life very difficult indeed for older people, and for some it will mean they will have to give up their card account and that means they will not be drawing out money where they used to spend it.

Question: Is it viable for local authorities to take over their running?

Charles Hendry: I certainly think that much more could be done to explore using post offices as an outlet for local authority services and so people should be able to pay their council tax and other charges there for example.

I know some councils are looking at whether they can have a more formal arrangement - Essex for example - and I will be looking very carefully at how they come out.

At the end of the day we should be in no doubt that this is the government's programme and so this isn't actually a problem of local government's making.

Question: What is your view on outreach services?

Charles Hendry: Clearly they are better than nothing but they are no replacement for a post office open four or five days a week. It will be a small lifeline, but no real replacement.

Question: How would the Conservatives keep them open?

Charles Hendry: What we are looking to do in our debate is say that the post office closure programme should be suspended whilst a full reassessment is carried out over the whole way in which the whole closure programme has been taken forward.

We think more time is needed at this stage to re-evaluate the entire process. Beyond that we need to do more work on how we ring more business into the post office network. That would mean enabling people to provide more services through their post office, for example working with local councils, new carriers or providing other financial services which sub-postmasters would like to develop. These people are much keener on relying on more business than on subsidies.

There will continue to be a need for subsidies but the government has got this the wrong way round and is managing the decline when we should be looking to see how we can build the network up.