THE number of people backing The Press's Cut The Closures campaign conhas now swelled to more than 6,000.

Since we launched ourcampaign to save sub-post offices in late November signatures have poured into our Walmgate office.

More than 800 of these did not arrive until after the consultation into the proposed closures ended last Thursday.

Post Office Ltd wants to close 50 branches across York, North Yorkshire and East Yorkshire as part of its nationwide network review.

The day before the consultation ended, we sent a delegation down to London to take our fight to the highest authority in the land.

We presented our readers' demands for their local post office to be spared to the Prime Minister's 10 Downing Street residence.

The party, including Clifton campaigner Les Marsh, Selby Labour MP John Grogan, and Julian Sturdy, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for York Outer, also presented a copy of the campaign dossier to post office chiefs at their Old Street headquarters.

Mr Marsh spearheaded a campaign to fight the closure of Clifton Green's post office and its last surviving bank, the recently shut-down HSBC.

He said the response to the Cut The Closures campaign showed the strength of feeling against post office closures in York and the surrounding area.

"We've given it the best highlighting we could," he said. "People need to take notice this is being done.

"The consultation wasn't perhaps deliberately done in an underhand way, but the majority of people in York wouldn't have necessarily got to know about it.

"Through The Press, 6,000 people have shown they're against it, and that speaks volumes."

The results of the six-week consultation will be released next month, according to a Post Office Ltd spokesman.

"We are scheduled to announce the final decisions on the proposals in the second week in February," he said. "Between now and then, we will look at all the feedback." The Press has learned sub postmasters will be informed of the results before then, possibly by February 1.

The spokesman said additional post offices could come under threat if some on the danger list were spared.

"As we said at the outset, it could be that if we withdraw a branch from the closures list, we will need to replace it with another," he said. "The Government has told us we need about 2,500 fewer post offices then we had at the start of the consultation process."