Post office customers in Oxfordshire will have to wait until next year to find out which of the county's branches face the axe, the Oxford Mail has learned.

A hit-list of sub-post offices set to shut under the Government's national closure programme will be published on February 5.

This will be accompanied by proposals for "outreach" services in the county, that could lead to people popping down to their local pub for postal facilities or buying stamps from mobile offices.

The publication of the hit-list will trigger a six week consultation, during which communities will be invited to lobby post office managers to keep their local branch open.

After considering the merits of local campaigns, the Post Office will release its final list of doomed branches about three weeks after the end of the consultation.

The Government has demanded the closure of 2,500 sub-post offices across the UK over the next 18 months, as a way of stemming huge financial losses.

If the closures were spread evenly across the country, Oxfordshire would be expected to lose about 30 of its 180-odd branches.

But information from the half-dozen areas which have already received their hit-lists provides little indication as to how the county will fare.

So far, the proportion of post offices earmarked for closure has varied from 11 per cent in East Yorkshire to 17 per cent in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

Yesterday, shadow post office minister Charles Hendry urged Oxfordshire residents to campaign "as hard as they can" to save their local branches, once the county's list was released.

He said: "They are vital institutions in so many of our communities."

Mr Hendry warned that the consultation might be "divisive", because it set communities against each other.

He said: "The problem we have is the consultation process has been organised in such a way that if a post office is kept open, then another one somewhere else has to close."

Ministers have promised that after the closures are complete residents in urban areas will remain within one mile of a post office and rural residents will be within three miles of a branch.

Mr Hendry advised campaigners to study the access criteria carefully to see whether post office managers had given proper consideration to geographical features, such as winding roads and rivers, which might push a post office beyond the maximum distances.

He said: "People should be looking at that sort of detail to make the strongest case for keeping post offices open."