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Royal Mail

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Geraldine Smith). I do not agree with much of what she said, but she has been a doughty and determined defender of postal services in this country. It is sad that we have to hold a debate about the very survival of one of the most loved services in this country. There is no doubt that Royal Mail has been an incredibly highly prized service. The concept of the universal service obligation means that post is delivered to every single house every day. Royal Mail has an excellent delivery record, as the hon. Lady said, certainly in comparison with many other countries, and the price has been very favourable, given the cost of delivering letters. The sadness is that, at best, the Government have allowed the service to wither on the vine over the past 12 years. At worst, we could say that they have comprehensively trashed it. First, the Government did not secure a level playing field. International operators can come to the United Kingdom to take some of the most lucrative parts of the business, perhaps making them loss leaders before making further advances later. British postal services cannot provide those same services in other European countries. The Government have been negligent in not pushing the issue further and not seeking a level playing field for Royal Mail overseas. Secondly, the Government are guilty of not having had a vision for the postal service and Royal Mail more generally. As a consequence, the management of Royal Mail have been left to manage the decline of the service. We have lost the Sunday collection. The first—indeed, the only—post arrives later and later, and the second delivery has been cancelled altogether. We have seen Saturday collections being moved to earlier times. I went past a post box the other day where the last collection on Saturday was at 9.15 am, so gone is the late morning collection, gone is the Sunday collection, and it is no longer the convenient service that it used to be. We must be fair and say that that is not the responsibility of the managers. They have been trying to manage a difficult business through difficult times and they faced a triple squeeze. I pay tribute to Adam Crozier for much of the work that he has done and for his genuine zeal and enthusiasm to deliver a 21st century service. He has been squeezed by the financial pressures that we heard about in the excellent speech from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), by the huge pension fund deficit, which would technically make the Royal Mail insolvent, and by increased competition both from other services such as e-mail and from other operators. Equally, we should not blame workers. There are, of course, major problems in some of the cities, but the postal workers in my constituency are incredibly diligent, hard-working, enthusiastic people who provide an outstanding service. From my contact with them—people who have worked in Royal Mail for many years, in some cases 20 years or more—I know that they want to deliver a continuing good service in the years to come and they recognise the need to modernise. The challenge will be to carry them with us during that period of change. It is right that the Business and Enterprise Committee will be asked to look into how the Post Office can offer services more akin to those of the financial services offered by banks. I agree with that because we suggested it. It was the Opposition motion last year that suggested that post offices should offer a wider range of services, but the Government Whips marshalled their troops to vote it down. The sadness and the irony of the situation are that a Government with vision would have decided on the services that Royal Mail and the Post Office could offer, before deciding to slash and burn their way through the post office network. The process should have been completely reversed. We should have looked at how we could extend the services and how post offices could offer more services to the community and then determined the size of network necessary to deliver that, rather than doing it the other way round. That is the charge that goes to the heart of the Government's failings. There has been no vision of how to go through the process, and they have ended up confused and unable to see their way forward, as was evident from the Minister's speech today. Royal Mail needs a massive injection of finance. It needs to modernise its processes and to invest in reskilling its work force. It needs to address the pension fund problems, about which we have heard so much. It needs to be able to compete with well-resourced international businesses. That means that there must be a new approach, and part-privatisation must be part of that process. There must be an opportunity to engage the work force and there may, therefore, be opportunities to involve them as shareholders in a revitalised business. But the Minister must accept that what the Government propose is part-privatisation. It is not full privatisation, but bringing in other investors is, by definition, part-privatisation. He should have the courage to say to the House that that is what the Government propose. We will support him in delivering that, because it is the only way to deliver the change that this vital service needs.