Survey of rural services finds that post offices continue to close

93.5% of households in rural England live within 2 km of a post office,but numbers of these outlets in rural areas continue to decline.

The parish-level figures below show a decrease7 in the number of parishes with post offices, in line with the broad trend of decline identified in previous surveys.
54% of parishes have a post office.
For both parishes and settlements there is a strong relationship with population size i.e. provision rapidly increases for both settlements and parishes of 300 to 500 residents or above.
Post offices in all sizes of settlement tend to be combined with another facility (22% of settlements); and only 5% of rural settlements have a separate post office.
The most common form of post office is one combined with a general shop, although some of the largest rural settlements have a greater number of separate post offices or post offices combined with other facilities.
The geographical availability of post offices is consistent across all regions but there are small numbers of households that are not as well served in virtually every region of the country. These are shown as the dark blue areas on the map.
A dense national network still exists with 387,000 (6.5%) rural households living more than 2 km from a post office, 29,110 (0.5%) rural households are more than 4 km away.
The regional summary table shows that, even in the North East which contains sparsely populated areas in the Pennine and border hills, only about one percent of all households live more than 4 km from a post office.
Evidence from previous parish surveys supports the view that the level of post office provision continues to decline – 58% of parishes had a post office in 1991 compared to 54% in 2000.

Full report can be found at http://www.countryside.gov.uk/rural services