Question: Postcomm is conducting a consultation on what services should be provided as part of the universal postal service in the UK. What is a "universal postal service?"

Graham Corbett: What the legislation did was provide a very broad description of the "Universal Postal Service", saying that it required a daily delivery and collection throughout the UK at a geographically uniform price, plus a registered postal service. And that's it. That's all the help you get from the legislation.

That was fine all the time that the Royal Mail was the only likely provider of universal services, it really didn't matter to try to define it. But now we're moving into a new era of opening up competition there then become some rather important questions to be answered as to exactly which service or services should be subject to the universal requirements of daily delivery and collection and the uniform pricing.

This is an exercise which has never been done before and we felt this was a good moment to embark on this, so what we're doing is putting out a consultation which asks some questions, to get interested parties to apply their minds to it and get back to us with their thoughts over the next two or three months.

Question: Why have you done this consultation now?

Graham Corbett: Because we're now moving into the process of opening up the competitive market. We opened up the first stage in January of this year. There will be another stage opened up in March 2005 and the whole market will be open in 2007.

Question: How would you summarise it having gone so far?

Graham Corbett: Well very little has happened so far. I don't think this is terribly surprising because the last of the big infrastructure issues that we have to sort out is the access price - the price at which operators coming into the market can feed mail into Royal Mail services for downstream delivery.

This is a matter which is being tested with a claim being brought to us by Royal Mail and UK Mail for us to determine what the access price should be.

I think a lot of would-be operators in the market are going to want to see how this turns out before they decide whether they want to come in and more particularly how they want to come in.

Question: Is there a case for regional postal costs - rather than nationwide ones?

Graham Corbett: I'm sure there could be a case for regional prices but this is not what we're asking. Parliament decided in the Postal Services Act 2000 that the universal service did call for a geographically uniform price.

This is not a requirement of the EU directive. The EU directive prescribes daily collection and delivery but does not impose a uniform price. However, many member states have decided to adopt uniform pricing for sound commercial reasons and have incorporated it into their legislation. So frankly its not for us to ask questions about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Our job is to get on and administer it. Clearly, had Parliament not made this decision then I'm sure we would have wanted to evaluate whether uniform pricing is right or wrong