Peter Luff is the Conservative MP for Mid Worcestershire and Chairman of the Business and Enterprise Committee.

Politicians in the UK are often criticised for not using modern technology and communication methods effectively to engage with the public. This is a fair criticism – we should be doing so much better.

Sure, there are MPs who flirt with blogs and ministers who ‘twitter’, but there’s still an overwhelming sense that parliamentarians are using new media to be seen to be using new media, and that we actually still don’t know our dongles from our floppies.

In stark contrast to the US, we have come nowhere near close enough to embracing the modern tools of communication and public engagement that the Internet now allows us to use.

I’m proud, therefore, that the Committee I chair – the Business and Enterprise Committee – has launched an innovative web-forum to make sure we hear the public’s views so that we can feed them in to our inquiry on the future of the Post Office network.

The Post Office – with its annual subsidy of £150 million – provides a valued and vital public service. The Government has asked us to look at how best to secure the future of the Post Office network. We wanted to extend this opportunity to every customer of the network, and the web-forum is the perfect platform from which to do this. After all, it is the individual users of the Post Office, and not just the Government or Parliament, who should shape the service to suit their needs

More details on the forum can be viewed here. We want to encourage as many people to participate in our forum as possible. The independent, all-party, nature of the Select Committee system means that the public can be confident their views will be taken into account when we report in the summer.

The web forum allows for people to be as creative as they like – in fact, the more creative the better! It will be open for six weeks and – I hope – will prove to be a really useful tool for improving the way the Committee gathers evidence in the future.

Parliament is here to serve the people. We should be doing all we can to involve them in the process.